Slow Rendering, White Background

Hello,

I am running FF XIV with a GeForce GTX 980Ti card, on a 4K monitor 3840x2160 in full screen and DirectX 9. I've noticed that the background is sometimes slow to redraw and flashes white, especially in Ul'dah. I've lowered my settings to "Standard Desktop" but even with that, it still happens.

A few notes:

• DirectX 11 makes it much worse.
• Setting it to "High Desktop" or "Maximum" makes it worse.
• I've tried lowering the resolution, but things look grainy and terrible... and really I can still see the white flashes though not as frequently.
• I finally tried a non-4k monitor but it looked sort of bad and I could still see them.

My graphics card is cooled as much as possible. I have a side intake fan blowing right on it. This system is an i7 w/32 mb of mem. I'd think it should be able to handle the game easily... but apparently not. Just wondering, are the background white flashes/redraws just a part of the engine and pretty much unavoidable? If so, not a big deal... just want to make sure my card is okay.

Lowering your settings probably made it worse - this is due to the setting "occlusion culling", which tells the game not to render anything that isn't directly visible. It helps overall performance but means that the game has to quickly load in new stuff all the time when you move around. As a side effect you get this kind of pop-in effect when you run around corners, of which there are many in Ul'dah. Untick "Disable rendering of objects when not visible (Occlusion Culling)" and see if it helps.

If not, then I'd say whatever hard drive or SSD you're storing the game on is performing so badly the game can't load objects quickly enough.