Stumped. Upgraded video card; FF14 unplayable.

I've exhausted all my technical "expertise" and desperately need help.

I was recently given a video card from a friend after she upgraded hers--it was better than what I had and would allow me to enjoy the game more.

I uninstalled and removed all my old video card drivers. I made sure to get the latest driver available for my new card. I even bought a new PSU to be able to support the card.

But when I try to play the game it's -worse- than ever. Before I was able to play despite having all the settings dropped and the gameplay window small. My FPS has bottomed out--it lags so bad I can barely get into the configuration window to make changes. I went from an ATI Radeon HD 5570 to a Nvidia Geforce 7025, so I just don't understand why I can't play. Is 8GB of RAM not enough? Did I do something wrong?

Can anyone make any suggestions as to help me? I'm tired of playing on my laptop and want to get back to my desktop asap!

Nvidia Geforce 7025
http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gp...2F+nForce+630a

That's not an upgrade. Should throw that piece of hardware recycle to be honest with you.

This is where your card is:
http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/vi...2F+nForce+630a

Score: 25

If you want to run FFXIV decently:
http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html

Around 3000+ mark GPU cards. Those GPU either $100-$150 budget cards.


These results are for me to give a perspective how low 7025 is.

Also OP, what is the rest of your system like? If your CPU is as dated as that GPU you may never have smooth gameplay.

This card is so bottom down and old, i didn´t even know it existed...

with that score, hell CPU-Graphic-Processing might be faster than that card..

Are you sure you didn´t mix up some numbers, as the only thing google puts out thats the 7025 is pretty old and poor Onboard Graphics Unit - I find no mentioning of an seperate PCI-E Card.

How did you determine the Cards Model? By the Print on the PCB or by your Device Manager - Maybe the Card you got isn´t even recognized or properly installed, so it might be your system fell back to your onboard graphics card!? Might also happen that you didn´t use the correct Power Connectors (had this problem myself one day), or your PSU doesn´t have enough power for it ...?

first of, you really should make sure what card we really talking about.

GeForce 7 series GPU... circa 2006 or so. That ATI card is about 4 years newer. Would be better off switching back. If you are looking for an upgrade from that and don't want to spend a lot on it, you can probably still nab something slightly newer pretty cheap. What is likely holding that 5570 back is the reduced pipelines, buswidth, shader units, etc.--a 5870 could give it a nice shot in the arm, especially if it's a Vapor-X in good shape...those things ran high clocks really well back in the day. Here's a side by side:

http://gpuboss.com/gpus/Radeon-HD-58...Radeon-HD-5570

Basically the same major grouping of cards (5000 series), but the 5800 series is a much more robust design that takes more advantage of the family's architecture. ATI did this thing with their numbers to help you narrow down the performance levels of the cards at a quick glance. The X500 cards are the stripped versions of their lineups--basically not meant for gaming, but more as a casual user. x600 were sort of mediocre-fair gaming level, x700 was entry-level performance gaming, x800 was performance grade, and x900 was enthusist level components. The last two digits indicated extra tweaking like memory bus and type (64-bit DDR2 would be low numbers like 30 or something, while high-speed 256-bit DDR5 would be top end with a 90). Nvidia follows a similar scheme as well--so it is important to pay attention to them when browsing so you can quickly weed out the lower performance grade models.

I'll admit, I had to look up that card.

It's so far down at the bottom that I thought you might have made a mistake.

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gp...2F+nForce+630a
has a score of 25. A current video card has a score well over 5000, making anything new more than 200 times faster.

More importantly, the nForce is the "onboard" motherboard chip. If you replaced the video card with "something better" that doesn't make sense since this is the motherboard chip. Are you sure what you installed wasn't something else? Take a look at the circuit board, it should say something like EVGA or Powercolor, and a model number.

You can also install Speccy so you can look up your graphics card model.