High end system, still lowish FPS

So, my system specs are;

*Intel I7 980X 6 core @ 3.33 ghz (i prefer not to overclock,longer lifetime and less heat)
idles @ 4 cores 23-28 2 cores 35-40 degrees celsius (pretty sure it's a design flaw causing the 2 cores to run hotter)

*24 gigs of DDr3 RAM @ 1066 (max the 980 will support without OC,since I don't OC faster ram would have been a waste--I am also a programming student, I chew RAM like pringles)

*NVIDIA 590 GTX (also not OC, I could, but meh)
Driver v275.27(Beta)

With my options at
res- 1920 x 1080
No AA
General Drawing Quality: 10(Highest)
Background drawing quality: 5(Highest)
Shadow Detail: High
AO: off
DoF: off
Enable Hardware Cursor: on
Texture Quality: High
Texture Filtering: Highest


My system should (in theory) run FFXIV with everything on, max, and maintain 60FPS, however with even the options as they are, I'm getting 55-60 FPS outside (yay outside) but am stuck at 35-45 in town (more players/npcs = lower end).

Am I missing something here? I should blow this out of the water with my rig. Hell, I can play the witcher 2 with ubersampling ON and pull 35 fps.

For some people 35+ is fine and "smooth" for them, for me anything less than 50 is unplayable (that's why I have such a high end rig, it messes with my eyes as I can notice the slowdown). I also have a lot of stuttering in town, any time a new NPC or character renders, FPS drops to 5-15 for a second or so. (monitored w/ FRAPS)

I can verify that both GPU cores ARE working, @ 96-99%. It also doesn't matter whether I play in windowed or FS(I prefer FS, but for some unknown reason they still haven't fixed the alt tab crash)

My question is, is there some mystery setting I should have flicked on or off somewhere that's causing this slowdown? Do I have to edit a .ini somewhere?Is it just extremely poor coding? I'm completely baffled. I thought my CPU might be bottlenecking, but when I turned off AA, I gained 10-15 FPS. 6 cores @ 3.3 should (again, in theory) be enough to handle this game as well.

Any suggestions?Thoughts?Comments?

Thanks much.

In my experience putting General Drawing Quality to 10 is more taxing than turning AO on. That is your problem.

I get 60FPS 98% the time with a 6970(@950), i7-930(@4.0) and only 6GB(1600) of ram.
Settings are as follows:
1920x1080
16xQ CSAA
GDQ: 8
BDQ: 5
Shadow: Highest
AO: Off
DoF: Off
Texture Quality: High
Texture Filtering: Highest

@Xiao

You'd still think the GTX590 (2 slightly underclocked 580's) would be enough to power GDQ on it's highest though

I'm actually considering throwing down another 700 bucks in 2 months to pop in another 590 for quad sli. Any games have slowdown with that and I'd have to slap a dev,lol

I'll turn it down and see what I get, but I still don't think that should be that much of a FPS killer

update to follow
**Update**

Turned GDQ down to 8, and tested with 16xQ CSAA and no AA

Framerate still would not go above 45ish FPS in town. With no AA it dipped down in the 30's a little less, but not enough to be significant. Don't think GDQ is the issue

**Further update**
I temporarily OC'd by increasing CPU ratio to 30, voltage to 1.35 which brought me up to 4008.85 mHz
ran FFXIV (after a 10 minute prime95 run for a quick stability check) and there was little, if any increase. Still hovered around the 40 FPS range. CPU apparently isn't the bottleneck, as there should have been some kind of increase but there wasn't.

This is really frustrating, I literally can't find any reason not to be having a solid 60 fps.

I believe this is the same issue as described in this thread: http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...hlight=stutter

If so please take the time to fill out the SE form just like in the last post I did. The more information they will get the better, and the most chances we will get a follow-up. Thank you!

i think this is just one of the many issues that they put into consideration...

@Kassad

I read through that post, as well as your nvidia post. I don't think it's HDD caching (I didn't notice any significant increase compared to rendering npcs and enemies outside town when compared to npcs and pcs in town)

I'm inclined to go with what the nvidia forum post suggestions that it's just horribly unoptimized code. I do agree that should be a top issue to resolve. The game needs to be largely playable before it can go any further. The "we're not charging you for now" shows some level of commitment, but a public acknowledgment of the issue, as well as some type of ETA or priority level of fixing it would say even more from SE.

My guess is they'll probably end up letting FFXIV die out. The rep of the game is pretty bad, and has been for > 6 months. If they could at least get the graphics and FPS issues worked out, there might be a chance, but as mentioned in some of the posts I read it turns a lot of people off (I won't play it as is, I know I'm not alone).

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by tizubythefizo

So, my system specs are;

*Intel I7 980X 6 core @ 3.33 ghz (i prefer not to overclock,longer lifetime and less heat)
idles @ 4 cores 23-28 2 cores 35-40 degrees celsius (pretty sure it's a design flaw causing the 2 cores to run hotter)

*24 gigs of DDr3 RAM @ 1066 (max the 980 will support without OC,since I don't OC faster ram would have been a waste--I am also a programming student, I chew RAM like pringles)

*NVIDIA 590 GTX (also not OC, I could, but meh)
Driver v275.27(Beta)

With my options at
res- 1920 x 1080
No AA
General Drawing Quality: 10(Highest)
Background drawing quality: 5(Highest)
Shadow Detail: High
AO: off
DoF: off
Enable Hardware Cursor: on
Texture Quality: High
Texture Filtering: Highest


My system should (in theory) run FFXIV with everything on, max, and maintain 60FPS, however with even the options as they are, I'm getting 55-60 FPS outside (yay outside) but am stuck at 35-45 in town (more players/npcs = lower end).

---

Agreed, you should run it maxed out with that rig, the FPS you get are equal to mine, and I run an i7 920 with a GTX 570.

My settings are as following:
Res 1920 x 1080
AA 8xQ MSAA
General Drawing Quality: 8 (Standard)
Background drawing quality: 5 (Highest)
Shadow Detail: Highest
AO: off
DoF: on
Enable Hardware Cursor: on
Texture Quality: High
Texture Filtering: Highest

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by tizubythefizo

Am I missing something here? I should blow this out of the water with my rig. Hell, I can play the witcher 2 with ubersampling ON and pull 35 fps.

---

You actually are running with supersampling, the game builds the frames in a buffer, and the size of this buffer is set by General Draw Quality.
A GDQ of 8 is equal to your resolution, a GDQ of 9 is x1.5 of your resolution, and GDQ of 10 is x2 your resolution.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by tizubythefizo

For some people 35+ is fine and "smooth" for them, for me anything less than 50 is unplayable (that's why I have such a high end rig, it messes with my eyes as I can notice the slowdown). I also have a lot of stuttering in town, any time a new NPC or character renders, FPS drops to 5-15 for a second or so. (monitored w/ FRAPS)

---

As Kassad linked you, this is due to HDD loading.
I used to run on a raid 0 setup with 2 Raptor HDDs, and I too suffered from some slight stuttering when first entering town or any area with a lot of people.
Resently I changed those for an SSD and have no longer any stuttering.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by tizubythefizo

I can verify that both GPU cores ARE working, @ 96-99%. It also doesn't matter whether I play in windowed or FS(I prefer FS, but for some unknown reason they still haven't fixed the alt tab crash)

My question is, is there some mystery setting I should have flicked on or off somewhere that's causing this slowdown? Do I have to edit a .ini somewhere?Is it just extremely poor coding? I'm completely baffled. I thought my CPU might be bottlenecking, but when I turned off AA, I gained 10-15 FPS. 6 cores @ 3.3 should (again, in theory) be enough to handle this game as well.

Any suggestions?Thoughts?Comments?

Thanks much.

---

The game is not well optimized, and neither is NVIDIAs drivers for SLI (for FFXIV) (I ran sli until recently changing to the GTX 570) and doing an update of the SLI profile using this method made a big difference.
I think changing the SLI profile is what will make you run the game satisfactory.

@loth

Thanks, I'll try out the new sli profile and see what I get.

How bad's the coding if it writes to the disk so often that it causes the game to pause that badly. write to a buffer? anyone at SE? buffers? yes?

On reading in, they should keep that filestream that contain the data for rendering pc's open for a bit rather than closing the filestream each time it's done rendering a pc.

I'm suspecting that it's set to open and close with each new PC character that pops onscreen, multiple onscreen takes so much longer this way because I'm guessing they implemented it in a way that it has to load in each character sequentially (that is for each character open filestream,get data,close filestream,move to next) rather than open file stream load data...hey more people coming by load data..hmm 30 seconds and no new characters onscreen, close filestream.

That's my take as a programmer on what could be causing that. No way to know unless I decompile their .exe which is above my paygrade.


***UPDATE**
Tried the sli import, no change to FPS at all (also played around with AA and noticed no change at 8xQ to no AA) I did notice that after applying the fix, my 2 cores are only running around 40% instead of 100.

I think this game is just not going to have FPS above the 40 range in town.

The game just isn't good when it comes to technical stuff like this. I have a powerful rig that can run Crysis and Crysis 2 no problem fully maxed out, but I have issues with FFXIV and I don't know about you guys but this game just isn't as "pretty" as Crysis and it sure isn't superior in graphics. So what is the deal with the sluggish FPS and also the screen shaking I mentioned in another thread? Does SE even care?

Because someone mentioned i should post here too.
Regarding to my thread http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...nes-from-1.17c and this one http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...hlight=stutter

Well, i could tell a little story about stuttering. I started this game on day one with an old rig (AMD X2 2,6 GHz, an ATI 3870, 4 Gb Ram , XP Pro and normal HDD). Gameplay wasnt that horrible as i had suspected but loading times around aetherytes were bad. Moving 360° made this game stutter etc pp. My Auzentech Prelude wasnt working well. I lost sound often. I played many newer titles on low specs. Never had any problems with the latest drivers.
I'm a programmer too and loosing sound told me, that the ram speed and chipset isnt fast enough or maybe more. Latency too high. I began to create my gamerig.
Basis was a Nehalem I7 3 GHz on W7 Ult. 64 bit. 12 gig Ram, old ATI for a while.
While the sound issues were gone, the game itself goes more stuttering than ever before.
Because the menue and textbox cluttered my 19" monitor, i took my last money for a 24" monitor and an overclocked GTX 470.
Disappointment. Although low on graphics settings stuttering were not gone, frames bad, loading of NPCs slow. I overclocked the CPU to 3,5 GHz. As i has expected the minimum frames were better. I would say much better.
The Cure: Crucial Real SSD 300. One of the best consumer SSDs and no Sandforce Chipset. NPCs and characters and all other textures were and are very fast on my screen.
Currently i am one of a few players, who has an edge. If my parties have a "lag" because Bw is crowded, they say the server is bad. There is a drop in network activity for sure, but the main lag are the HDDs and rendering all characters around them. If i get teleported im instant in the new area and can run; other characters are often well behind me.

All in all the game has alot of problems as 32 bit client. 2Gb of Ram isnt enough. Too much HDD reloading. The game utilize only one main core. So the most expensive CPU doesnt work well, if its at stock speed.
BUT: The most important and i think the culprit of my latest stuttering. The game doesnt use Tesselation textures, which are rather small, instead uses a bunch of heavy weight textures, which are not cached in any form. Direct X11 was promised and we didnt get it. My actual graphics settings are very high with only AO and AA off. And im relative sure, that my Vram is not enough anymore.
My stuttering issues at local leves delivery at wasted camps are a problem of the animation. I think SE changed something here. Because we have an animation now. There is a blend in effect of 15 frames total black. After this 250 ms, the entire screen has to be redrawn from scratch. All textures reloaded etc. pp. I know that the 470 has a bad memory behaviour. I will test it today and post the results in my thread.

This game needs a ramdisk, even if a ramdisk is heavyweight on CPU. The other option , the gamefiles must be decompressed on HDD, even if it takes us 50 Gb on Filespace. The eternal loading of compressed files to get one texture out of it, kills HDDs very well and is a maior draback on gameperformance.

Edit: The stuttering was indeed a bufferoverflow of the vram. Cards under 3Gb Vram have alot of problems on higher resosutions wit hthis game.

But indeed, i have written much to improve gameplay, but you have the 60 fps limitation netherless. To get even this 60 FPs set the general graphics quality to 9 otherwise no actual graphicscard can handle the game at those FPS ranges. I don't want to talk about Sli or Crossfire. It could help but multicard installations have their own problems.

For what its worth, those of you on Vista or Windows 7 can add all kinds of nifty monitoring gadgets to your desktop. If you have multiple monitors this works great.

I have one for GPU, System (cores/ram), Network, Hard Drive, weather and time. There are a pair of support programs that augment temp readouts and virtual memory by adding sensor kit software to the mix. So all in all I can see everything happening with out about 1 second lag from the sensors. Well all but Shader core and Video Ram... but that's another story.

What I have observed with my i3-560 and ATI 4650, is that my Hard drive is generating allot of lag as I walk in town. In-fact in town the demand on the GPU drops to about 35%. The lobby server locked me out and I cannot login, I see 21% on a black screen. GPU @ 109 and fan 12%.

Now aside from the issue a hard drive can cause when it has to keep pulling data to display the screen, so to can a network cause lag. Infact in many MMORPG the network cuases more lag than the hardware especialy when your in a buisy location.

You can always turn down or off the graphics. But the network and HDD accesses are pretty much fixed for you.

I agree a high end system should be able to brave the waters. Unfortunately its not as simple as get the best and win the battle. I have been through this with a Microsoft flight sim nut who refused to listen when our shop told him that his SLI was not able to handle his Flight Sim on High. We would fix the comp and he would call and complain that it didn't work and he was angry. We told him not to adjust the settings, which he always did because he believed the combined power should be more than enough to play the game on High. To bad, Microsoft Flight Sim... NOT COMPATIBLE with SLI.

The lesson I want you to take is that just because you have the best there is doesn't make you a GOD. If it doesn't work, realize that there's a reason for this. It might be the Hard drive, it might be your network, it might even be the software is not yet fully compatible with your hardware. Take a breath. Quit the game. Reduce your settings. Enjoy the game like he rest of us, just for a little while. I am sure a patch will come soon enough and you can test out your power then.

It might surprize you to know but it's a simple fix, you would think i wouldn't lag with my rig (below) but before i upgraded my Platter HDD to an SSD, it made a HUGE differance. The sluggish framerates were due to my HDD constantly looking for information as characters, PC/NPC were showing up as i was running/they were running to me, ever since i have had everything maxed with 60fps.

Intel Core i7 2600k @ 5.1ghz - Noctua NH-D14
4GB RipJaw 2133 7-8-7-16
Dual Radeon HD 5970 O.C Core: 850 Mem: 1200
120GB Corsair Force SSD R: 260MB/s | W: 270MB/s
Corsair Professional 1200W

Before i would run into Gridania or some camp with a hand full of people and i would have to come to a complete stop to let it catch up, i noticed early on that my HDD indicator was lit up contantly, my frames rates seemed to increase but a tad, when i say a tad, i mean the old HDD (7200rpm platter) made my frame rates dip from 60 solid to 30-45 for several seconds or until i stood still, it would continue to fall behind until it evetually stuttered, this was maxed out as well, now i can't even tell if someone is coming towards me and it's a nice change.

1920x1080
8xQ MSAA
General Draw Quality: 10 (Highest)
Background Drawing Quality: 5 (High)
Shadow Detail: Highest
Ambient Occlusion: On
Depth of Field: On
Texture Quality: High
Texture Filtering: highest

Keep in mind that if you don't have a 64 bit system you cannot run with Virtual memory off and that will be needed. You might want to use a tweak program to send virtual memory to another quick disk based HDD. SDD are great for read back but not so great for writing.

I'm considering picking up another 590 GTX to run in quad sli, and maybe a 120GB ssd to install the game to. If I can't hit 60 FPS with that set up, then it's definitely a broken game (considering that's the most powerful possible graphics card set up there is...for the next few months anyways >.>)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Chumeia

Keep in mind that if you don't have a 64 bit system you cannot run with Virtual memory off and that will be needed. You might want to use a tweak program to send virtual memory to another quick disk based HDD. SDD are great for read back but not so great for writing.

---

Even with a 64 bit system you should NOT turn virtual ram off. Windows still pages memory, and turning vram or paging off could cause lots of bad things to happen or not work properly. Windows should only make use of Vram once memory use is high anyways. It'll then check to see what hasn't been used in a while, or what is inactive, and page it to the HDD. enough ram and it won't need to go through this process, but if you turn Vram or paging off, then that one time it would need to do that it won't be able to and BAM memory error

http://www.sevenforums.com/performan...managment.html

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/25...virtual-memory


Also had a big discussion in my college OS class a few months ago about the same issue. There is no performance gain (even if you think there is, there's not. it just does not work that way) for turning of virtual memory,and doing so CAN cause errors. So it's a no gain but possible loss scenario.

Especially with win7, the WMM is very good at what it does.

Just got a new 2500k system with C300 SSD and win7-32 to replace my e8400 with 15krpm hdd for playing newer games. Keeping the same old video card, a GTS250, I get a steady 60fps almost everywhere with no stuttering at all. Occasional slowdown to 30fps happens due to a GPU bottleneck (99% usage reading with GPU-Z), even with all graphics settings at their minimum and 1024x768 resolution. It seems that cpu usage never gets above 48% or so, with 1 thread occasionally hitting 22% usage.

Since I use the machine only for playing games, I only have 4gb of RAM installed, with paging turned off. I've trimmed windows down to the bare minimum, so it is only using about 350M of memory. I've only tested with XIV, but so far no crashes or odd behavior due to no paging file. All the games I play are 32bit, so I'm using 7-32, and XIV doesnt seem to be "large address aware". The XIV benchmark scores about 2% higher with the 32 bit edition compared to 7-64, so I'm sticking with it for now :D

As far as paging and SSDs go, it seems that most new SSDs have very fast write speeds, so it's not a performance problem to place the pagefile on them. It will cause them to wear out faster, however. If you can stand troubleshooting occasional strange things happening, you can run with paging off. If you only run 1 program at a time with no virus scanner or any other background programs, you probably won't have any problems. I think turning off the pagefile also disables suspend-to-RAM sleeping.

@Diraco

Read this...

http://lifehacker.com/5426041/unders...dnt-disable-it

Nothing good can come from keeping paging off. People that say it's good have no idea what they're talking about. DO NOT LISTEN TO THEM.

The page file is only used when A) it needs to be (some apps and sometimes windows itself demands it. Windows will just turn on PF when it needs it and won't tell you). B)You've got a program minimized for a long period of time. It's not active, and doesn't need to hold up space in RAM.

You've got 4 GB, that's not enough to try to run without PF. You will eventually end up with some funky errors/weird behavior (that chances are you won't even attribute to the missing PF).

It's bad mojo, baaaad mojo. A system crash due to lack of memory is a baaaaaaad thing. no bueno. But don't take my word for it, read the article.

*EDIT*

Also read...

http://serverfault.com/questions/236...ne/23684#23684

and the links he posts to get a better understanding of virtual memory and how windows handles it.

Fact: If you don't fully understand how PF is used by windows, how memory allocation works, how paging works

DON'T MESS WITH IT.

Would you just start pulling wires on a car without knowing exactly what will happen/what could happen?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by tizubythefizo

@Diraco

---

If you are only running XIV (which isn't large-address aware), and a minimal set of services, 4gb is plenty. I have yet to see XIV use much over 1.2GB, even. Most people want to run more than one thing at a time these days, though, along with a virus scanner, and they don't mess with any background stuff.
So, it's true: the paging file shouldn't be disabled on a machine with a workload that isn't carefully controlled. Best to just leave it on!

@tizubythefizo

Do you have a FFXIV profile in your "Nvidia Control Panel" under "3D settings"? There's a setting called "Antialiasing Transparency" in there. As per Nvidia's recommendation, changing this setting to "Multisample" offers superior performance. Well, from what I've experienced, I can tell you it DOES NOT offer "superior performance". In fact, it caused my game to stutter like mad.

So I went back into my settings and changed it back to "OFF" and clicked APPLY. Loaded the game again and STILL terrible stuttering. WTF. Turns out the setting didn't save. Yes, it says "OFF", but the fact is it's still on "Multisample"... just not visually. And so this time I clicked "restore" to restore the FFXIV profile back to default settings, and the stuttering went away. Now I know you're thinking it must have corrected some of my OTHER settings back to default, and so that's why there's no stuttering now. Well, that wasn't the case because I already had all my settings set to default long before the restore. And just to prove my theory, I regenerated the problem 5 times so it's definitely that buggy multisample option at least for me.

In other words, if you've messed w/ that option in the past, try to do a restore, and see if that works for you.

HTH... cheers.

For those of you still using a HDD like me and have some stutter, everytime you restart your computer run a windows 7 defrag on your drive before you log into the game, i've tried other defrags to see not the same results but they may vary. I know its irritating to run a defrag once or more a day for those of us who like to turn our systems off sometimes but it does seem to completely remove all stutter from the game for me and another system i built. SSD ftw guys ~ get one, i need to; ;