Any plans on optimization?

I know this game has a ton of stuff that needs to be fixed first, but I'm still curious if there are any plans to optimize this game. I have a monster PC and this game still runs extremely choppy at times. I'm not getting my hopes up because better optimization is probably far down the list of things needed to be addressed, but I thought I would ask anyways.

I definitely second this. I spent a crap load of money on my beast of a machine, and while the game looks great, I also notice that it gets pretty choppy sometimes.

The only time it gets choppy for me is if it has to send a bunch of data to their servers at once, like when I enter the city, and it has to bring up a bunch of character data so they get displayed on my screen.

So what needs to be optimized is how the clients communicate with the servers. That'll probably take care of a bunch of choppiness.

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Originally Posted by Eekiki

The only time it gets choppy for me is if it has to send a bunch of data to their servers at once, like when I enter the city, and it has to bring up a bunch of character data so they get displayed on my screen.

So what needs to be optimized is how the clients communicate with the servers. That'll probably take care of a bunch of choppiness.

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From what I have seen that sort of choppyness seems to be because so much data needs to be pulled from the HDD, I have seen people say that a SSD stops it, because a SSD is alot faster than a HDD, but it could partly be network related as well.

Probably won't happen until closer to PS3 release. But I do hope they fix shadows and lighting, especially on the characters.

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Originally Posted by Delsus

From what I have seen that sort of choppyness seems to be because so much data needs to be pulled from the HDD, I have seen people say that a SSD stops it, because a SSD is alot faster than a HDD, but it could partly be network related as well.

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I can see where that's true. I got a HUGE improvement in the amount of time it takes to load a lot of character models on the screen simultaneously when I upgraded my graphics card from a GTX275 to a GTX580.

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Originally Posted by Rynithon

Probably won't happen until closer to PS3 release. But I do hope they fix shadows and lighting, especially on the characters.

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Speaking of shadows, does anyone else get a ton of lines in their shadows rather than just a solid shadow, or is it just me?

Devs have stated they will be continuously optimizing it as time goes in several post so far. They just said it will take some time to do it.

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Originally Posted by Delsus

From what I have seen that sort of choppyness seems to be because so much data needs to be pulled from the HDD, I have seen people say that a SSD stops it, because a SSD is alot faster than a HDD, but it could partly be network related as well.

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I upgraded to an intel 510 SSD, and it has made a huge improvement in loading and choppiness. But like others said, I think its a lot of network related problems, and the game holds to wait on server responses.

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Originally Posted by miqokini

Speaking of shadows, does anyone else get a ton of lines in their shadows rather than just a solid shadow, or is it just me?

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We all get it, no matter what setting. It used to not be in early Beta version, then in the last Beta (ultimately the final build of the game) build it was there.

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Originally Posted by Eekiki

I can see where that's true. I got a HUGE improvement in the amount of time it takes to load a lot of character models on the screen simultaneously when I upgraded my graphics card from a GTX275 to a GTX580.

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That would help because the extra power of the 580 allows it to render the graphics from the dats alot faster, It could be a mix of everything though, maybe an official responce so we know where we would need to upgrade for the best performance, or if its somthing SE SE can fix and where they are on it.

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Originally Posted by Delsus

That would help because the extra power of the 580 allows it to render the graphics from the dats alot faster, It could be a mix of everything though, maybe an official responce so we know where we would need to upgrade for the best performance, or if its somthing SE SE can fix and where they are on it.

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It runs much worse than it should for me, and I don't even have everything maxed. Running an i7 @ 3.6 and 3x 470 SC in Tri-SLI.

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Originally Posted by Louisville15

It runs much worse than it should for me, and I don't even have everything maxed. Running an i7 @ 3.6 and 3x 470 SC in Tri-SLI.

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Do you play in fullscreen or windowed? because SLI does not work in windowed mode, therefore if you switch to full screen you should see a large performance increase, but there is also the terrible latancy and the speed of the HDD which both cause lag as well, which is why a SSD helps alot.

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Originally Posted by Delsus

Do you play in fullscreen or windowed? because SLI does not work in windowed mode, therefore if you switch to full screen you should see a large performance increase, but there is also the terrible latancy and the speed of the HDD which both cause lag as well, which is why a SSD helps alot.

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Full screen.

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Originally Posted by Louisville15

Full screen.

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You must have some bottleneck in your system if its lagging much

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Originally Posted by Louisville15

It runs much worse than it should for me, and I don't even have everything maxed. Running an i7 @ 3.6 and 3x 470 SC in Tri-SLI.

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My guess would be try running it just on 2x SLI mode and see if it helps. Maybe the game doesn't fair well with trisli.

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Originally Posted by Rynithon

My guess would be try running it just on 2x SLI mode and see if it helps. Maybe the game doesn't fair well with trisli.

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It doesn't even work well with 2x SLI mode according to some user feedbacks. Crossfire scales better it seems(that's my impression). To avoid the stuttering in town (or other places with many people) they have to reduce the poly counts for non-ultra-highend GPUs and make the loading algorithm async with a big cache. Currently it's like this: something needs to load = your game stops.
The shadows also need some rework, but that's really low priority.
BUT is it just my imagination or does disabling the shadows do nothing performance-wise? Are they rendered even if they are disabled? lol

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Originally Posted by Coldfire

It doesn't even work well with 2x SLI mode according to some user feedbacks. Crossfire scales better it seems(that's my impression). To avoid the stuttering in town (or other places with many people) they have to reduce the poly counts for non-ultra-highend GPUs and make the loading algorithm async with a big cache. Currently it's like this: something needs to load = your game stops.
The shadows also need some rework, but that's really low priority.
BUT is it just my imagination or does disabling the shadows do nothing performance-wise? Are they rendered even if they are disabled? lol

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I actually noticed that too, shadows off does nothing, so yeah they are being rendered no matter what.

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Originally Posted by Delsus

From what I have seen that sort of choppyness seems to be because so much data needs to be pulled from the HDD, I have seen people say that a SSD stops it, because a SSD is alot faster than a HDD, but it could partly be network related as well.

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SSD doesn't fix choppiness. Using a 50 GB OCZ Vertex II with only OS and FFXIV installed and I still have choppiness, all the time, with graphics set to "Standard" across the board. Especially during weather effects. Rest of my PC is of similar quality (Radeon 5850, 3.2 Q9550, 8 GB RAM). I can run anything perfectly except FFXIV. :(

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Originally Posted by Ava

SSD doesn't fix choppiness. Using a 50 GB OCZ Vertex II with only OS and FFXIV installed and I still have choppiness, all the time, with graphics set to "Standard" across the board. Especially during weather effects. Rest of my PC is of similar quality (Radeon 5850, 3.2 Q9550, 8 GB RAM). I can run anything perfectly except FFXIV. :(

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I would say thats because of your CPU, even though its at 3.2GHz an i7 has features that help to improve performance, like turbo boost (if its needed) and hyperthreading, which your CPU doesnt.

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Originally Posted by Ava

SSD doesn't fix choppiness. Using a 50 GB OCZ Vertex II with only OS and FFXIV installed and I still have choppiness, all the time, with graphics set to "Standard" across the board. Especially during weather effects. Rest of my PC is of similar quality (Radeon 5850, 3.2 Q9550, 8 GB RAM). I can run anything perfectly except FFXIV. :(

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Your choppiness is due to the weak HD5850. It just can't handle this many polygons in crowded areas. With my HD5870 I get 60 fps most of the time. If I play fullscreen and use Crossfire I always get 60 fps.
You can set everything to highest except general drawing (8) and AO. There isn't much difference since the polygon count is the same.

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Originally Posted by Delsus

I would say thats because of your CPU, even though its at 3.2GHz an i7 has features that help to improve performance, like turbo boost (if its needed) and hyperthreading, which your CPU doesnt.

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The Q9550 is more powerful than the low end of i7s, the only CPUs worth upgrading to would be a hi end i7 or i5 and I can't justify upgrading my mobo + cpu with the current games on the market. If this game requires a high end i7 just to be able to play smoothly on Standard settings, then that's a serious design flaw. I know people with significantly worse computers than mine claiming to run on higher settings just fine. This would indicate a serious optimization issue.

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Originally Posted by Coldfire

Your choppiness is due to the weak HD5850. It just can't handle this many polygons in crowded areas. With my HD5870 I get 60 fps most of the time. If I play fullscreen and use Crossfire I always get 60 fps.
You can set everything to highest except general drawing (8) and AO. There isn't much difference since the polygon count is the same.

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Perhaps you can shed some light on this then. I have a friend who plays using a Geforce 460. According to the benchmarks (i'll let you Google them, they are everywhere) a 5850 performs higher than a 470 (one model above the 460). This friend has his settings all set higher than mine and claims to not have any sort of choppiness at all with a standard HD and a comparable CPU (IIRC he's using a low end i5). How could this discrepancy be explained?

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Originally Posted by Ava

The Q9550 is more powerful than the low end of i7s, the only CPUs worth upgrading to would be a hi end i7 or i5 and I can't justify upgrading my mobo + cpu with the current games on the market. If this game requires a high end i7 just to be able to play smoothly on Standard settings, then that's a serious design flaw. I know people with significantly worse computers than mine claiming to run on higher settings just fine. This would indicate a serious optimization issue.




Perhaps you can shed some light on this then. I have a friend who plays using a Geforce 460. According to the benchmarks (i'll let you Google them, they are everywhere) a 5850 performs higher than a 470 (one model above the 460). This friend has his settings all set higher than mine and claims to not have any sort of choppiness at all with a standard HD and a comparable CPU (IIRC he's using a low end i5). How could this discrepancy be explained?

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Yors may be more powerful than low end i7s but i7s are have alot more featured to use all cores more effectively than yours, also the have 2 threads per core which allows them to multitask or run applications that support hyperthreading more efficiantly than the Q9550.

The high send i7s are the extreme seires which have 6 cores at 3.4 or 3.6 so they are hugely more powerful, but even with a low to mid range i7 you should see some performance increase.

Also a low end i5 is not comparable to your cpu because the i5 is dual core (admitedly with 4 threads) and yours is quad core, while I say 2 threads per core makes it more efficient, it does still have the physical limits of a dual core for i5 and quad core for an i7

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Originally Posted by Ava

Perhaps you can shed some light on this then. I have a friend who plays using a Geforce 460. According to the benchmarks (i'll let you Google them, they are everywhere) a 5850 performs higher than a 470 (one model above the 460). This friend has his settings all set higher than mine and claims to not have any sort of choppiness at all with a standard HD and a comparable CPU (IIRC he's using a low end i5). How could this discrepancy be explained?

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Benchmarks don't tell anything about actual performance in a game. Some benchmarks use lots of post processing, others use lots of data bandwidth and others focus on polygons. Another thing is the optimization(some games favor nvidia, some favor ATI).

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Originally Posted by Delsus

Yors may be more powerful than low end i7s but i7s are have alot more featured to use all cores more effectively than yours, also the have 2 threads per core which allows them to multitask or run applications that support hyperthreading more efficiantly than the Q9550.

The high send i7s are the extreme seires which have 6 cores at 3.4 or 3.6 so they are hugely more powerful, but even with a low to mid range i7 you should see some performance increase.

Also a low end i5 is not comparable to your cpu because the i5 is dual core (admitedly with 4 threads) and yours is quad core, while I say 2 threads per core makes it more efficient, it does still have the physical limits of a dual core for i5 and quad core for an i7

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You're wrong about i5s, they are quad-core. They started as dual-core but just like i7s they have evolved. i5s are considered some of the best gaming CPUs on the market right now. Top end i5s are competitive with top end i7s for gaming. (Sources: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...or,2989-5.html and http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html)

And I still don't think it's a CPU issue. But if it is, then SE needs to seriously reconsider their plans for FFXIV on the PC because that's terrible. Most people have worse CPUs than I do.

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Originally Posted by Coldfire

Benchmarks don't tell anything about actual performance in a game. Some benchmarks use lots of post processing, others use lots of data bandwidth and others focus on polygons. Another thing is the optimization(some games favor nvidia, some favor ATI).

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I realize generic benchmarks aren't a good measure of performance in any game, but even in the FFXIV Benchmark software released @ beta I had a really decent score on high settings. Yeah, that software kind of sucked but you'd expect the actual game to at least perform slightly better, unless of course it's poorly optimized. I'm not trying to defend my hardware, but rather agree with the OP that this game is poorly optimized. A game nowadays should not require top of the line PC hardware to run. I've heard plenty of testimonials on forums of people claiming that mid-end PCs actually run FFXIV better than high-end PCs because of how poorly optimized the game is.

I play a lot of games, and you're not going to convince me that none of them use high poly counts like FFXIV. I have never to this date had any problem running any game on max settings, outside of FFXIV, whether that game be Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Rift, Dragon Age, Starcraft 2, Crysis, etc.

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Originally Posted by Ava

The Q9550 is more powerful than the low end of i7s, the only CPUs worth upgrading to would be a hi end i7 or i5 and I can't justify upgrading my mobo + cpu with the current games on the market. If this game requires a high end i7 just to be able to play smoothly on Standard settings, then that's a serious design flaw. I know people with significantly worse computers than mine claiming to run on higher settings just fine. This would indicate a serious optimization issue.




Perhaps you can shed some light on this then. I have a friend who plays using a Geforce 460. According to the benchmarks (i'll let you Google them, they are everywhere) a 5850 performs higher than a 470 (one model above the 460). This friend has his settings all set higher than mine and claims to not have any sort of choppiness at all with a standard HD and a comparable CPU (IIRC he's using a low end i5). How could this discrepancy be explained?

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A 5850 better than a 470? lmao. No.

I think you're looking at old benchmarks (before the 470 drivers matured, resulting in a 20%+ performance increase).

The 470 trades blows with the 5870, often coming out on top.

EDIT: Also, there is no way that other guy is maintaining 60+ fps with a single 5870, unless he is playing at a tiny resolution or something.

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Originally Posted by Louisville15

A 5850 better than a 470? lmao. No.

I think you're looking at old benchmarks (before the 470 drivers matured, resulting in a 20%+ performance increase).

The 470 trades blows with the 5870, often coming out on top.

EDIT: Also, there is no way that other guy is maintaining 60+ fps with a single 5870, unless he is playing at a tiny resolution or something.

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Yeah, upon second glance, you're right. But even still, my point still stands. (I'm trying to support your statement dammit. :()

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Originally Posted by Delsus

I would say thats because of your CPU, even though its at 3.2GHz an i7 has features that help to improve performance, like turbo boost (if its needed) and hyperthreading, which your CPU doesnt.

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Few games make use of hyperthreading (and I doubt FFXIV does -- I could be wrong though) and in the cases that the games do not, most actually suffer a slight performance hit if HT is enabled. Again, this is usually very small, but it certainly doesn't help in the games that do not support it.

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Originally Posted by Ava

Yeah, upon second glance, you're right. But even still, my point still stands. (I'm trying to support your statement dammit. :()

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I'm just calling it like I see it, lol.

And the only difference between the i5 and i7 is hyperthreading. That's it. In 99% of cases (i.e. not editing or encoding) a i5 is more than enough power to get through modern games. Again, I seriously doubt this game utilizes HT, as the majority of the games do not.

That's not directed at you, but at that other guy. lol

I too custom made a beast PC for this game right before it went live.

I too use SDD.

When I turn on the option for Depth of Field, the game is very choppy.

When I turn this option off, I have no more choppiness.

Running the game currently on 1680x1050 Resolution fullscreen, 6x QSAA, Standard on textures, low/disabled shadows, standard draw distance setting, max texture filters/ whatever the other option was, i still get alot of choppiness through the game sometimes, but its mostly in main cities which are expected to be a bit more demanding, although with the amount of money i spent building my rig i was expecting to get alot more performance on XIV, but obviously i was wrong. The Black Shroud seems to be the worst actual zone regarding frame rates for me no matter what my settings are.
This is my build:

i7 960 @ 3.2Ghz (Stock)
Rampage 3 Extreme mobo
12GB DDR3 1600MHZ Corsair Vengeance RAM
128 Cruicial Real SSD
MSI Nvidia GTX580

Although i seem to recall a pretty detailed thread back on FFXIV some months ago regarding FFXIV requiring alot more CPU processing power rather than using the GPU more but im not totally sure., i certainly think it needs some more optimizations.

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Originally Posted by Crica

I too custom made a beast PC for this game right before it went live.

I too use SDD.

When I turn on the option for Depth of Field, the game is very choppy.

When I turn this option off, I have no more choppiness.

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I have the same results with depth on field, it just doesnt like my setup.

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Originally Posted by Crica

I too custom made a beast PC for this game right before it went live.

I too use SDD.

When I turn on the option for Depth of Field, the game is very choppy.

When I turn this option off, I have no more choppiness.

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I have DoF off and it is still much choppier than it should be.

If I can run better looking games at 60+fps easily, there is no reason this game should run like it does, without all of the settings even maxed. It looks half as good as some other games yet runs twice as bad.

Since 1.18 went live most of the choppiness went away for me, yet it is still very much present at times. I don't have a ssd atm but I imagine with it I should be almost as smooth as butter for the most part :D Always forget to pick one up hehe Anyone else notice less choppiness with 1.18 as well?

My PC runs Crysis almost on full settings. Individual animated hi-res foliage swaying in the wind with draw distances as far as the eye can see. Smooth framerates.

XIV bad framerates the grass is a flat texture and the chunky trees pop into view within 100 meters also the foliage looks low res un-animated and really odd.

Something is definitely not right here.

I'm not sure it matters but I'd much rather have a lot worse graphics than this and see other players in the distance more. Usually people pop in and out of view way too close. In XI at least it was easier to follow a group because I could actually see them.

Seems like a case of bad servers combined with bad graphics draw-order prioritization.

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Originally Posted by Louisville15

EDIT: Also, there is no way that other guy is maintaining 60+ fps with a single 5870, unless he is playing at a tiny resolution or something.

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I never said I maintain 60+ fps with a single 5870. Where did you read that? I said I have 60 fps most of the time with my single HD5870(which is overclocked) and always 60fps with Crossfire.

edit:
SE please offer a setting to increase or decrease the maximum player count displayed at once. It would help ALOT imo. An even better solution would be to implement either multiple models with different levels of detail or let this be done by tesselation (probably not gonna happen but there's nice techdemos showing how this works).

I think most of the problems with stuttering comes from the servers. I don't think ANYBODY can maintain a solid 60fps without getting an occasional hiccup here and there. Hopefully they'll fix it, but I doubt it's their top priority...though it should be. They should also optimize the game to run on weaker systems.

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Originally Posted by KamikazeMan

I think most of the problems with stuttering comes from the servers. I don't think ANYBODY can maintain a solid 60fps without getting an occasional hiccup here and there. Hopefully they'll fix it, but I doubt it's their top priority...though it should be. They should also optimize the game to run on weaker systems.

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I agree that it definitely should be a priority. With a lack of content, or a lack of X feature that someone might desire, you can always forget about that whenever you are doing something else in the game. The sluggish performance occurs with everything you do. It's like a constant frustrating aspect of the game no matter what you are doing.

fast SSD (400mb second+) & a fast CPU will solve most your problems (3.4ghz+ 4 core+)

solved mine last year.