CPU or GPU?

Only one question, is this game harder on the GPU or CPU?

Would probably depend on the type of each you have, but generally the GPU will be doing most of the work with this game.

CPU does see a lot of utilization in heavily crowded areas. GPU is for everything else. MMO's tend to rely on both.

Most MMOs are badly optimized so they rely more on CPU, but this game depends more on your GPU than CPU. Basically what Valkyrie said.

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Originally Posted by Crystal_Raven

Only one question, is this game harder on the GPU or CPU?

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This game ate quite a few bad GPU's upon each version update. Version 1.0 killed GPU's. Version 2.0 killed GPU's, The DirectX11 killed GPU's.

By "killed" I mean it exposed bugs and poor optimization in the drivers that caused the cards to crash, and the game with it. The game has yet to kill a CPU that I'm aware of.

Version 1.0 and the DirectX9 versions of the current game are harder on the CPU due to lack of multi-threaded draw calls in DirectX9. So a 4Ghz CPU is still better than a 1.6Ghz CPU on the DX9 version. On DX11, multithreaded draw calls are supported, which means that a quad core CPU is better than a dual core cpu, where as under DX9 it wouldn't have mattered how many cores you had. So a 2.4Ghz Quad core may outperform a 2.8Ghz Dual core just by virtue of having that extra capacity.

But all things considered equal, the game is very hard on weak GPU's and any shortcuts taken by the GPU to squeeze extra performance or cut costs.

GPU does most of the job!...


If you have a powerful card by letting the GPU take care of the PhysX processing it might prevent low fps on under heavy loads, a trick I learned on this forums when someone mentioned it!...

When I upgraded from a i980x (a cpu from 2010~) to a much more modern and powerful i7-6800k, there was some difference in the game but I wouldn't call it major. I suspect that the motherboards chipset architecture matters far more than the cpu itself.

When I added a second geforce 970 to my system there was major improvement (though unless you've got a uhd, 4k or 144hz monitor, I think a single 970 can handle anything this game can throw at it with only rarely dropping to less than 60 fps)

Ive heard that ffxiv is more cpu intensive than other games. I have no idea if thats true or not, but on the other hand, Ive seen a lot of gaming rigs where people will spend thousands and thousands of dollars on graphics cards, and $200 on the cpu. Consensus is that high end CPUs are overkill for gaming.

Short answer: GPU, probably by a long shot.

(also get an SSD if you dont have one. its night and day in terms of load times)