Occlusion Culling Perfomance Issues/Drop--Comprehensive

This issue--massive performance drops while panning the camera when Occlusion Culling is enabled--has been in the game at least since ARR was released (I did not play the beta, but I assume it was in there as well) and has yet to be addressed. Worse still is the fact it seems to be either ignored or swept under the rug by random forum trolls who clearly have no idea what they are talking about.

I took the liberty of taking four comparison screenshots which literally sum up entire paragraphs of the undeniable existence of the issue and the obvious cause. To those who don't want to bother examining the screenshots, I will sum it up it lay-man's terms: occlusion culling is a common technique used in games whereas objects/characters/models are temporarily ceased to be rendered when they are occluded by some form of geometry, such as a wall; this is a fairly common feature as most games would be unplayable/lagtastic without it. FFXIV has this feature as optional and, to put it bluntly, the feature basically stops working when the player rotates/moves his or her camera even a millimeter.

Again, before anyone has some troll comment, please, look at the screenshots and pay attention to the occlusion culling option in the lower left and the framerate display in the lower right or even the integrated one in the options pane.

Occlusion culling enabled while standing still and not moving the camera--63fps, looks good... (or about 15.8ms of frame draw time & 80% GPU usage for the tech savvy)
http://i.imgur.com/4oSGCdZ.jpg

Occlusion culling enabled while moving the camera a few centimeters--dropped to 43fps, a 46.5% performance hit (about 25ms of measured frame draw time & GPU usage at 55%, whereas it should be around 23ms, so there is an immediate pipeline problem here)
http://i.imgur.com/t7VX3vx.jpg

Now, notice what happens when I turn occlusion culling off while the camera is not moving.
http://i.imgur.com/T9gxnMF.jpg
Interesting... getting the exact same framerate and frame draw time as before with occlusion culling bugging out

To put the nail in the coffin, notice how there is literally zero performance hit with occlusion culling off and moving the camera
http://i.imgur.com/RNdMFwv.jpg

As much variables as possible were accounted for and no screenshots were altered in any way.

I have tested this issue with the 331.65 drivers (latest), 331.58, 327.23, 320.49, and the 320.18 versions (cannot go back farther on a GTX 770) and the performance drop remains consistent throughout--though the latest three drivers have consistently better performance in GPU bound areas.

Finally, before someone claims it is a problem on my end, I am using the following which obtains a 12300~ performance score on maximum @ 1920x1080:
4.0GHz (locked) i7-930 (a 4.5GHZ 4770k will be about 25-30% faster in a 4-core application)
1215MHz GTX 770
6GB RAM @ 1333MHz (total RAM usage never exceeds 3GB while running FFXIV)
Windows 7 Pro 64bit
Samsung 840 Pro SSD (game drive)
screenshot or it didn't happen: http://i.imgur.com/K4xqV6b.jpg

I have also tried even single possible idea anyone can think of, so please don't recommend any run-of-the-mill ideas; these would include things such as hyper-threading on/off, vsync on/off, updating drivers, running in windowed, lowering settings (almost all settings are GPU related and have almost no effect in this situation as it is strictly CPU related), putting it on an ssd (it is), re-installing windows, turning off background applications, turning off SweetFX, turning off MSI Afterburner, stop overclocking, unparking cores, turning on/off speedstep, turning on/off C1E support... you get the idea.

I would report this on geforce.com too.
After the last release they said they were going to work on ARR compatibility.

It depends on how they implemented the culling. Did they use IDirect3DQuery9? What do the bounding volumes look like? The game was hastily and sloppily coded with few security measures implemented. This might be fixed in future patches, but that's only for Yoshida to decide. Bringing it to their attention now might lead to better implementation with their DX11 client. Sadly, what you've discovered will most likely not be fixed for the DX9 client.

Perhaps, but I would not be surprised if this is the root cause for a lot of players performance issues whether they know it or not. You can find volumes of performance complaints which go something like "I AM LAGGING PLZ HLP" with no real information or research done on the problem; the only results I was able to find on this specific problem were either ignored or computer illiterates brushed the issue off as a problem with the plaintiff's system. Frustrating to say the least... especially since this game, sans the OC issue, is one of the most technically proficient MMOs I have come across, an MMO of which I genuinely enjoy playing.

A very specific problem with a specific feature in a specific game is not a problem on my end, it is most likely a problem with the game or with current nVidia drivers (I don't own any AMD cards to test the problem, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was there as well).

I've never posted in here before - always lurked around.
But for this I'm making an exception, because I really want SE to see and address the issue.

Technically proficient is not how I would describe this game. You should not be able to send SQL inputs over the internet to edit your character's DB entries server side with zero sanitizing, yet you can. BELIEVE ME when I tell you, things are going to get really fucking awful now that it's known how to perform such an action on a player other than yourself. Fraudulent purchasing was just the beginning.

You are indeed correct on that front, there are issues the game has which are mind blowing, such as the servers apparently not keeping track of player positions which allows botters to literally teleport around to different nodes and the recent market board hijacking. I probably should have specified it is very technically proficient (in my experience, I have played a lot of MMOs) from a graphics/performance standpoint; most MMOs which look any better than WoW usually have a host of performance problems which are never addressed and people just have to stick with or get used to the idea where 30fps is "normal" on a high end system

The occlusion culling option reduces the impact of CPU limited scenario's by no longer drawing objects that are masked and offscreen. Generally this reduces cpu usage (or just improves the rate in which visible data reaches the gpu) which increases the GPU usage and the framerate as a result.

What you are seeing is a result of the culled data no longer being in video memory, and having to be streamed back in from system memory - which you have little of on that 930 so its actually fishing the data from the GPU Commit (Paged out) memory.


Windows Memory Management is actually fairly complicated, so you cannot rely on the memory used column in task manager.

I would also like to see this fixed!

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Originally Posted by Squa11_Leonhart

The occlusion culling option reduces the impact of CPU limited scenario's by no longer drawing objects that are masked and offscreen. Generally this reduces cpu usage (or just improves the rate in which visible data reaches the gpu) which increases the GPU usage and the framerate as a result.

What you are seeing is a result of the culled data no longer being in video memory, and having to be streamed back in from system memory - which you have little of on that 930 so its actually fishing the data from the GPU Commit (Paged out) memory.


Windows Memory Management is actually fairly complicated, so you cannot rely on the memory used column in task manager.

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Not exactly sure what you are talking about, I have more than enough memory for this game; FFXIV is a 32bit app meaning it cannot use more than 4096MB theoretically or around 3.4-3.6GB in a Windows environment (taking into account large address awareness, which I assume FFXIV is, but I have not checked). Additionally, the amount of L1, L2, and L3 cache in the i7-930 is identical to the 4770k--256k, 1MB, and 8MB, respectively.

There are very little performance gains in any real-world scenarios, even gaming benchmarks, between the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th (Nehalem, Westmere, Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, and Haswell) generation Intel procs. Any performance gains are quite minimal clock-for-clock--the actual performance has completely stagnated as they have been too preoccupied with energy efficiency and worthless integrated graphics.

Also, keep in mind this game has clearly been optimized for the PS3 (ultra low res textures indicate this) so there is simply no way memory could be the issue in any way, since the PS3 has a nonexistent amount of any kind of memory, whether it be system or cache. I have not played the PS3 version, but it obviously needs to use occlusion culling, same with the soon to be released PS4 version, as the former is based on 6-year old tech and the latter is based on mid-range laptop components.

In any case, as I mentioned in the original post and as you kind of mention, the culled data should not be being retrieved in the first place, since the visual data the user receives is not changing--I am not walking around corners, you can look at a flat wall and the performance drop will happened because, for some reason, the game is trying to render things behind the wall, be they character models or other geometry on the map, while it is still occluded.

Just out of curiosity, I tested the affects of Occlusion Culling on memory usage (system, private, working, commit, GPU) and needless to say, on/off seems to have no effect on memory usage, so the game is clearly not releasing the occluded data from memory; here are some screen shots--the highlighted row in task manager is ffxiv.exe. (ignore the crazy fluctuations in Afterburner, they were caused by tabbing around)

Enabled (OC on)
http://i.imgur.com/xUg8ntu.jpg

Disabled (OC off)
http://i.imgur.com/oBIMXCe.jpg

Granted, I am not a computer science major, but I am quite sure this proves it is not a memory-related issue.

afterburner and task manager only provide a small portion of whats actually going on memory wise

use process explorer instead.

Since you seem to be insisting it is a problem on my end (even though my CPU is still better than 85%+ of gamers) what memory values do you want me to look at? There is no significant change in GPU system, dedicated, and committed bytes when OC is on/off or when the camera is moving around, nor is there a change in working or private bytes (other than constant small fluctuations for both system and GPU memory).

If these problems are somehow related to CPU or RAM limitations on my end, you can be rest assured over 80% of the player base is experiencing the same problem, whether they realize it or not; whereas they either have low-end systems and lag all the time anyway (very, very common in my experience), complain about lag but have no specifics on its nature (all too common), or attribute the lag to "normal" since it is a highly populated MMO (again, all too common).

Actually, your memory usage dropped by about 15-25 MB. Which seems on par with activating OC. My theory is FFXI poorly uses the IDirect3DQuery9 command for calculating meshes to cull. When you move the camera within the game, it has to recalculate all of the meshes, identify the polygons that can be discarded, and render the scene. That recalculation adds a few milliseconds to the rendering of the scene, at which point the calculations complete and the benefits kick in. So what you're seeing is this backface culling engine at work sacrificing 8-10ms to recalculate all faces of every model's mesh that are not visible on your screen. Yes, this includes characters and objects that were not visible on the screen since the last time the algorithm was used.

The problem is, IDirect3DQuery9 is not a terribly efficient method of culling on its own. Sloppy usage of this query results in lots of draw call overhead and noticeable latency while the GPU waits for the results of the queries. There are algorithms for reusing query data, but there's no way of us knowing if SE uses them without some reverse engineering or a drinking with chatty dev. Anywho, I tested your findings on my system and I see the same drop in GPU (GTX 660 SLI) usage, but I also see a shift in CPU (i5-3570k @4.2GHz) usage. All four cores seem to change their utilization. What I did was slowly pan the camera around the market area in Ul'dah while watching my G15 keyboard's LCD, I saw a 15-30% drop in GPU usage while panning and a 20% spike in CPU usage on one core, with a more moderate 10% increase in the remaining three cores. My fps would dip from 42-45 (22-24ms) down to 36-38 (26-28 ms). Not as drastic as your system, but still a variance of about 2-6 ms in draw time. With culling disabled, my fps remained a constant 36-38 fps during the same panning action as well as stationary. Take into consideration my framebuffer usage is smaller due to running the game at 1080p. Might be time to upgrade your CPU! Hope this information helps.

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Actually, your memory usage dropped by about 15-25 MB. Which seems on par with activating OC. My theory is FFXI poorly uses the IDirect3DQuery9 command for calculating meshes to cull. When you move the camera within the game, it has to recalculate all of the meshes, identify the polygons that can be discarded, and render the scene. That recalculation adds a few milliseconds to the rendering of the scene, at which point the calculations complete and the benefits kick in. So what you're seeing is this backface culling engine at work sacrificing 8-10ms to recalculate all faces of every model's mesh that are not visible on your screen. Yes, this includes characters and objects that were not visible on the screen since the last time the algorithm was used.

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Yep, i can confirm this behavior having seen the world and pc/npcs vanish and pop-in simply by moving in and out from behind someones chocobo in first person view.

I'm hoping the D3D11 client implements multi-threaded display lists and tesselation, the game is rendering an obscene amount of polygons for distant objects for which tesselated sub division should improve gpu usage (lowering it) for the same level of detail.

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Originally Posted by Syx

Not as drastic as your system, but still a variance of about 2-6 ms in draw time. With culling disabled, my fps remained a constant 36-38 fps during the same panning action as well as stationary. Take into consideration my framebuffer usage is smaller due to running the game at 1080p. Might be time to upgrade your CPU! Hope this information helps.

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Indeed, I am aware of my aging proc; Intel's genius decision of ceramic thermal paste in place of solder to attach the IHS to the cpu die, resulting in anywhere from 5c-10c higher temps accross the board has made me reluctant to do so, since I am not exactly a fan of the "de-lidding" concept as the modders refer to it as.

But in any case, going by the latest steam hardware survey, if this issue is a combination of CPU limitations and their admittedly insane draw distance which users cannot change--for example, I can be in the Alchemists guild and still get massive performance drops if I look in the direction of the marketboards--the performance issues related to it are overwhelmingly widespread; not even 15% of people in the survey would be using what could be considered a higher-end ivy/sandy or haswell proc, and since this game caps out at 4 cores/threads, AMD users are going to be in even dire straits.

Did I say FFXI? Wow. Flashbacks of the same issues experienced in an eleven year old game. Thanks Squeenix.

In response to Intel's zany thermal dissipation designs, all-in-one water cooling devices for the CPU are now affordable, efficient, and function well enough to counterbalance the increase in temperatures caused by poor construction by Intel. On my 3570k I never get above 65 Celsius at full load using a Tuniq Tower 120 Extreme air cooler with the fan at the highest. http://www.frostytech.com is a great resource for finding a CPU cooler that will fit your needs.

I usually tend to avoid frostytech as their 150w load is quite unrealistic; my 4GHz i7-930 at 1.3v w/ HT enabled (I use SVP, kind of the only reason I use it) far exceeds 150w--stock TDP is 130w at 2.8GHz with 1.25v vcore, 1.35 QPI. I use a Thermalright TRUE Spirit 140 with two fans which still ranks up there with the Archon and Silver arrow on high clocks. Once you start hitting high clocks, the thermals increase two-fold--increased frequency and greatly increased voltage requirements. Higher frequency = lower electrical resistance = higher current = higher wattage/heat generation.

From what I have read and seen from "de-lidded" comparisons, it doesn't matter how amazing the cooler is if it is passive (whether it be air or liquid) since the ceramic TIM acts as a huge bottleneck transferring energy from the CPU die to the IHS to the heat-sink, in that order. At lower clock speeds it is not too much of an issue, but the temps really start to skyrocket around the 4.4GHz+ area--people getting 80c or higher even on top-end closed loop systems. Personally, I would want to shoot for a minimum of 4.5GHz since it seems to be around the sweet spot/plateau for 4770k procs, just like 4.0/4.2GHz is for 920/930 procs.

Unrelated to to your reply, I have noticed the performance issues have gotten a lot worse recently, around the same time they released the "fix" for draw distances related to coils. This could be related to that, or just the increase in server load/population over the last month.

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Originally Posted by ReiqMagnus

[...]and since this game caps out at 4 cores/threads, AMD users are going to be in even dire straits.

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Tell me about it. I run an FX CPU @4ghz. Never had any issues with MMOs in the past - runs GW2 like a charm on max settings for example.
This bug is seriously ruining my gameplay experience, it actually forced me to take a break from the game, eventhough i love it.
In Uldah for example, while looking at the adventurers guild without moving the camera, i get 60fps stable (synched). As soon as i move around my camera it drops to 25ish fps, sometimes 30 depending on how crowded the zone is.
Here's hoping to the DX11 version. But i'd love to see it fixed before that...

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Originally Posted by AeryM

In Uldah for example, while looking at the adventurers guild without moving the camera, i get 60fps stable (synched). As soon as i move around my camera it drops to 25ish fps, sometimes 30 depending on how crowded the zone is.
Here's hoping to the DX11 version. But i'd love to see it fixed before that...

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Same issue, same area/direction. The "hot spots" seem to be with character model heavy areas--player characters only I think, since in a lot of areas, such as instances and around The Waking Sand, both of which have a lot of relatively static NPCs a boat load of geometry, don't seem to have the problem.

I played this game on my Radeon HD 5770 and had no problems. Framerate was always smooth. When I upgraded to a Geforce GTX760 the problem described here in this topic began. Even on the settings I previously used for my HD5770 I still get framerate drops that just didn't happen before I upgraded to the GTX760, and those drops happen exactly as the first post describes. Just wanted to add this information because it might be relevant. Could it be a problem for nvidia cards only?

PS.: The only thing I upgraded was my video card. Everything else remains the same.

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Originally Posted by JarvanLance

I played this game on my Radeon HD 5770 and had no problems. Framerate was always smooth. When I upgraded to a Geforce GTX760 the problem described here in this topic began. Even on the settings I previously used for my HD5770 I still get framerate drops that just didn't happen before I upgraded to the GTX760, and those drops happen exactly as the first post describes. Just wanted to add this information because it might be relevant. Could it be a problem for nvidia cards only?

PS.: The only thing I upgraded was my video card. Everything else remains the same.

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Interesting... if what you say is indeed true, I may try out my old GTX 480 and some < 320.xx drivers and see if it is related to newer revisions; if that turns up with nothing, I may swap to a r290 or something when I am RMA'ing my GTX 770. I will post an update on the matter if the thread is still around for what its worth.

Can't suggest anything here, yet never observed the aforementioned performance hit while turning the camera w/ occlusion culling enabled.

-ASUS P8C WS (bios 3402)
-Xeon E3-1270 v2
-Geforce 690 (331.82 currently, yet never witnessed it in all prior releases either)
-Kingston KVR DDR3 1600, 9965525-055 (32GB, ECC enabled)
-Dell U3011
-Windows 8.1 64bit

-vsync enabled, 60fps target set in-game. Nothing else relevant to list really.. Rotating the camera maintains 60 fps, or whatever the FPS level is at the time (around players at the market board).



---Possible that the issue doesn't occur in SLI setups, or with the massive bandwidth of PCI-E 3.0?

Also, before someone asks "Why aren't you playing in 'max' settings" -- A Geforce 690 cannot handle 2560x1600 at 60 fps (even in dungeons) consistently. The general best SLI scaling that you achieve is 70%, yet there's areas such as the first boss in WP where SLI scaling goes to "zero" if High-Quality Transparent lighting is enabled (50% usage per GPU). In those cases, FPS drops to 35-40 -- which takes a hit in your DPS potential.


I'm actually in the process of (have ordered) a Radeon 290x to replace this card. Without the SLI scaling issues at specific map locations, and seeing as you can't reach 100% performance scaling as is (in SLI), I fully expect a single 290x to run better.

Glad to hear this may be NVidia isolated... Will post back results with the 290x and also try different resolutions / shutting off one of my GPU's to see if I experience your observed effect.


Edit #2 -- 1920x1200 & 1920x1080, one GPU disabled, cannot reproduce FPS drop during camera rotation (in the overworld and near the Uld Market Board).

Well, Windows 8.1 is a huge difference, there isn't much else aside from that--memory amount, bandwidth, and PCI-E bandwidth are irrelevant in this case or would have a non-existent affect on performance. The GTX 770 is the same gk-104 in the 690 and the Xeon E3-1270 you have is comparable in terms of performance to mine (especially if it is not overclocked). The other main variable would be server pop...

May I request that you disable vsync and the fps cap, as well as comparing your fps with occlusion culling on/off and attempt the process again? If there is any significant change in fps the issue is present, just not as severe.

The performance hit mainly happens in certain hotspots, so you would want to be in roughly the same place and facing the same direction as I was in the screenshots--if you look directly at the market board, or face to the opposite side of the retainers, the performance hit isn't anywhere as severe or is simply not there, respectively.

I can now confirm, having checked the market board in the northern section of Uld at multiple times of the day, including prime-time, that there "IS" indeed a performance drop when rotating the camera. The drop is however, very insignificant (2-3 fps dip at the maximum when the game is running > 100 fps, with vsync off and the camera aimed directly into a wall).


Basically to put it another way: I won't notice it unless I disable vsync, the ingame FPS cap / target, disable high-quality transparent lighting, SSAO / FXAA, etc, and additionally move myself to the back alley facing the board (through the wall) -- [Obstruct LOS to the most possible players / objects]. I also had to move up to using the latest MSI Afterburner to actually "see" the FPS hit, using 2.3's new "Sliding Window" based FPS calculation (rather than the once per second of older versions). (the drop is an almost instantaneous hickup)


Honestly, I'm not sure that this is a bug so much as intended behavior (an optimization as pointed out by Syx). As long as the camera isn't rotating / moving, the scene isn't changing in terms of static-objects in the world between the observer and those objects to be occluded. If a player is stationary (as players primarily are standing infront of the market board or retainer bell) there's no reason to check object-occlusion a second time (until said time as they move). The same can be said for static geometry behind the wall. It's also not necessary to perform VFC against these objects either, or to recompute the view frustum unless the camera is moved. So really ... the FPS drop during turning could be fully intentional in terms of caching object occlusion, and a check re-performed on an interval during camera position changes (or object movement) rather than every frame (this would explain how certain objects can remain occluded when panning the camera initially around a corner -- not being visible for a split second). It would be expected that complexity is slightly higher during panning the camera.


I've no idea if the difference is Windows 8.1 or my transition to Ivy Bridge / the P8C WS. Sadly I no longer have my P6T7 WS / Xeon w3580 (Gen 1 i7) to test with (which would be a near identical setup to yours). I can say though that my transition to the E3 1270v2 "did" eliminate all load-stutter that I had in Crysis 3 (without swapping Operating Systems -- as I used to run Win7 until almost the end of Win8 [due to severe issues with the mobo's NIC, TCP packets arriving out of order at the application layer] ). My w3580 was clocked at 4.13ghz on water cooling (the w3580 and w3680 chips are unlocked multipliers, which is extremely rare to see for the Xeon line).. The E3 1270v2 is "not" overclocked, as unlike the 3580 it's a locked processor (the P8C WS [and all C206 chipset motherboards for that matter] also do not permit bus speed adjustments [at all] without tampering with the bios).

That said, I can't shut off PCI-E 3.0 in the P8C-WS's bios (despite that alot of C206 chip boards do permit this). So, I can't really experiment in terms of what causes the improvement over your setup (minus if it's the OS). I can say though from experience that overkill bus bandwidth does have a very real, though subtle effect, on any loading / resource transfer related stutter in a game (despite that it doesn't impact total and average FPS very much).


EDIT: I suppose I could test this to the extreme degree by moving my 690 down to another slot that runs at PCI-E 2.0 x4. Yet this would be absolutely crippled due to the 690's onboard PLX bridge, and probably meaningless.

So I just switched back to my old GTX 480 and tried the latest 331.82 drivers as well as the 314.22 drivers (I was reading around these were supposedly good drivers for FFXIV at the time). The issue was still present in its fullest, so it does not seem to be related to a specific architecture or driver revision on the nVidia side. I also need to reiterate that this issue in no way can be hardware related, as the performance hit is massive and any differences between my current hardware and even top of the line current hardware is < 30%. It must be game related (the feature not working correctly) or some kind of AMD/nVidia or OS compatibility issue.

Edit: I was planning on trying a high-end AMD card in the between time on my GTX 770 RMA, but after reading countless complaints about artifacts, failures, noise, and thermal issues, that is simply not going to happen any time soon until AMD fixes their mess of the R9 series. Also not going to touch windows 8.1 with a 10-foot pole; so unless SE wants to actually start investigating the active posts on this forum (which from the looks of it they never do, all the "solved" cases seem to be threads which just died out of lack of updates and apparently when people stop posting on them they consider the problem "fixed") the issue is going to remain unless an AMD user wants to thoroughly investigate the issue as well (screen shots and documentation w/ proper frame time monitoring). Honestly would hate for this game to turn into a Rift where the devs just stop caring about fixing technical issues because they are too preoccupied adding junk no one wants/needs/requests.

I felt compelled to chime in here with my own experience, as I have been wrestling with this very same issue for the past few weeks. My setup is as follows:

AMD FX-8350 (very modest OC to 4.4GHz)
Gigabyte Windforce GTX 770 4GB
16GB Kingston Hyper-X RAM (1600MHz)
Asus Sabertooth 990FX 2nd Gen (latest BIOS update)
Samsung 840 Pro 256GB SSD (game is installed here)
Western Digital 1TB Caviar Black HDD

I usually run my games with Vsync enabled, as screen tearing drives me nuts. I can stand idle at 58-60 FPS, and spin the camera around to find the FPS dip as low as 36 FPS sometimes (45 is probably the norm though). With Vsync disabled, the issue is surprisingly more noticeable on my end, as I can stand idle at 110 FPS, but the dip from any camera rotation takes me as low as 55 FPS and causes a jarring "stutter" in gameplay. I run the game at high/maximum settings, but have tried the lowest possible settings as well, and this dip in FPS is still present, albeit not as jarring.

I have tried a few different driver releases - 320.49, 327.23, 331.40 (beta) and 331.58 (my current driver). Same, or similar, performance across the board in regards to FFXIV. In my desperation, I read multiple threads on various websites and tried several fixes that people have suggested - unparking cores, adjusting page file size, disabling/enabling HPET. Nothing seems to have an effect.

Just a few hours ago, I took it upon myself to drag my old PC out of storage and install FFXIV to it. This PC has an AMD Phenom 965 BE, 8GB of RAM, a 256 GB Samsung 830 SSD, and, most importantly, a 1GB HIS 6870 GPU. I cleaned up the computer, installed Windows updates, installed the latest AMD display driver, and fired up FFXIV. Much to my disgust, the camera rotation stutter that I experience on my "upgrade," the Nvidia rig, is nowhere to be found. I have not been able to replicate the aforementioned performance issues yet, and am doubtful that I will. While the rig isn't quite strong enough to maintain a constant 60 FPS at maximum settings, I've been playing on what I'd consider to be "medium" settings, and FPS is just sitting pretty at 57-60 FPS. I'm sprinting through the streets, jumping, and spinning the camera all around. No issues. I'm playing FFXIV on my old PC more smoothly than I even thought was possible.

I had read that AMD users were experiencing their own issues with the game, but this has me at a loss. I'm strongly considering selling the 770 at this point.

Any chance you would be able to swap the GPUs from one rig to another? That would literally prove whether or not it is a problem related to nVidia cards or not (just to make dang sure it isn't anything else).

On a side note, unless you only play FFXIV, I wouldn't sell that 770--it is 2-3x more powerful in most games than that 6870 from any benchmarks I was able to find.

Because I didnt mention earlier: I use an EVGA GTX570 OC. So it might actually be a nVidia related issue,

From what I've been gathering, it really seems to be an nVidia issue. One of my friends had the exact same problem I reported earlier in this thread. He upgraded his old Radeon HD 4850 to a Geforce GTX 770. It's almost better to stick with his older card. The only reason he doesn't is because he wants to play other new games (AC4!) that benefit from his much needed upgrade.

Indeed, there seems to be a significant trend of it being nVidia only; only problem is, is it a problem on nVidia's side (driver related) or a problem on SE's side (poor optimization)?. I will head over to geforce and bring this up, whether or not anything comes of it is unlikely, though.

My GTX 780 also suffers from the panning-fps-drop problem with culling active. I'm using win7sp1-32bit and a 2500k@5GHz, 331.58 driver.

It seems that there have not been any further posts about this concern being an ongoing issue. Because of this, we are considering it to be resolved. If this does continue to be a concern, please create another thread to further discuss resolutions or contact the Support Center at support.na.square-enix.com for assistance.