hardware, settings, fps etc.

hello!

so my my Graphicscard (HD 3850) died some days ago. and i got my new HD 7850 today. since the new one is a lot faster then my old i decided to play around with ffxiv settings and general graphiccard settings.
It seems the settings u set in the controll center for the graphiccard doesnt apply. at least stuff like anti aliasing didnt work so i had to use the ffxiv options.
So i played around with the ffxiv settings and ended up with these settings:

windowed
1440x900
4x MSAA (many of the AA settings seam to be nvidia only)
8 General Drawing Quality (setting this higher would make the games resolution higher and casling it down back to your screen resolution ending up with an anti aliasing like effect?)
5 Background Drawing Quality
Highest Shadow Detail
Ambient Occlusion off (im not sure what it does? makes things shiny? well it seems to drop the fps by atleast 10-20 %)
Depth of Field off (makes things that are far away blurry)
High Texture Quality
Highest Texture Filtering

All graphical ingame settings (physics, shadows etc.) are set on on and the fps is set to 30. setting it to 60 i get strange stuttering every 3 seconds when i move my character around. the game runs then somewhere between 30-60 fps.

Als ran the FFXIV benchmark but and got barely 4000 points on 1280x720. the benchmark ran most of the time between between 60-80 fps but often droped for like 1 second to somewhere between 1-10 fps. thats very strange and shouldnt happen in my opinion.
I know its not a very good bench but still its strange with such a behaviour.

my system:
Windows 7 64bit
AMD Phenom II X4 955
8 GB DDR 3
2 x Crucial M4 (SSD) 64 GB in RAID 0
Sapphire Radeon HD 7850
1440 x 900 (32 bit) (60Hz)

So i wanted to actually now on what settings you run ffxiv, what kind of hardware and how smoth (fps?) it runs on your system. Any suggestions are welcome too.

Hm...I have a HD5770 and run the system at comparable settings (my background quality is 3 and my texture settings are all standard, but I'm running in a 1920x1200 window). Based on my experience, overriding the settings in the Catalyst Control Center or whatever it's called now by changing them from "Application Specified" can affect your FPS in FFXIV in positive and negative ways. You may get more FPS by setting them all back to application default.

thx i will try it with the standard settings and look if i can enhance game settings this way.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Saiph

8 General Drawing Quality (setting this higher would make the games resolution higher and casling it down back to your screen resolution ending up with an anti aliasing like effect?)

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GDQ of 9 renders the frames in a buffer 1.5x your resolution and a GDQ of 10 uses a buffer 2x your resolution.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Saiph

Ambient Occlusion off (im not sure what it does? makes things shiny? well it seems to drop the fps by atleast 10-20 %)

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Adds extra shadows to areas where direct light should not be due to geometry.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Saiph

All graphical ingame settings (physics, shadows etc.) are set on on and the fps is set to 30. setting it to 60 i get strange stuttering every 3 seconds when i move my character around. the game runs then somewhere between 30-60 fps.

Als ran the FFXIV benchmark but and got barely 4000 points on 1280x720. the benchmark ran most of the time between between 60-80 fps but often droped for like 1 second to somewhere between 1-10 fps. thats very strange and shouldnt happen in my opinion.
I know its not a very good bench but still its strange with such a behaviour.

my system:
Windows 7 64bit
AMD Phenom II X4 955
8 GB DDR 3
2 x Crucial M4 (SSD) 64 GB in RAID 0
Sapphire Radeon HD 7850
1440 x 900 (32 bit) (60Hz)

So i wanted to actually now on what settings you run ffxiv, what kind of hardware and how smoth (fps?) it runs on your system. Any suggestions are welcome too.

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I can not help you with the slow downs, I saw a video of the benchmark run on a 7970 and that had slowdowns too, could be driver related to their new cards, it seemed to coincide with texture loading.

As to your score, the "benchmark" is heavly CPU bound, so that is a big part of why your score is as it is.

If you run in a window, or crossfire w/ 2 monitors, leave the catalyst control center open and watch your GPU usage? Running in a window not only is crossfire not available but the game offloads nearly all the graphics work on the CPU instead of pushing the GPU, this is a fault between the game and driver for AMD cards.
In full screen you should on the other hand see your card hitting 100% pretty much full time.

Basically AMD gfx support is straight busted, but leaving the games settings off for: Anti Aliasing, Ambient Occlusion, Depth of Field, and one that I'm not thinking of atm, and override them in CCC it'll get more of the work back onto your GPU and off your CPU, Depth of Field is Anisotropy, use CCC's Texture Filtering instead of the games as the game uses the CPU to do it's AA calcs. All of this is only for windowed mode.

In fullscreen alot of these same settings help by allowing the card to do it fulltime, and always use AMD optimizations where it can. Leaving it all application controlled leaves to many non-optimized CPU heavy calcs.

If you happen to want to risk a third pt app that does a little more, and digs deeper: http://www.radeonpro.info

It's also the fail point on the benchmark, it runs in a window and can't utilize your gfx card to it's fullest.

It seems the seetings from the CCC do not work at all on this game. AT least i can tell that AA doesnt work. Maybe im doing something wrong.
Thats wahy im usinf the game settings atm.

Sorry I didn't mention this in the last post, don't know how I forgot it.

When you change the settings in the CCC you have to also save the application profile, in this case you need to save it with the ffxivgame.exe or the CAP settings take over and override your own. They basically say let the game control everything.

When you change settings without saving them to a particular application they only apply to applications that don't have settings defined in the CAP. So just save that profile to the ffxivgame.exe inside CCC overriding all application settings to allow CCC to control things properly.

radeonpro simplifies those steps but also opens up new options that CCC doesn't offer up. Of course the more options you have access to the more risk there is that you'll introduce instabilities.

ah i didnt know that. i thought you can do it but you dont ned to do it.
when im finished setting up i just need to save the profile with a name like, FFXIV?
Can i save the profile anywhere or do i need to do it in a special folder?

edit: or do i need to link it with save button to the ffxiv.exe? edit2: if yes to witch exe you link it? ffxivboot, ffxivgame or ffxivloggin?

link it, it'll be added to the profiles tab, ffxivgame.exe

I've found today that my driver also occasionally locked up, dunno why that is, no crash ingame no fails, but my framerate would plummet.
Since I play in a window (get the same frame rates in a window as w/ dual 6970s, it's sad) I was able to open task manager and kill all the CCC/ATI/MoM tasks and restart the whole driver, how this didn't cause a crash I dunno but my frame rates went back to normal^^

hmm im not sure why but i still cant get the AMD VISION Engine Controll Center settings to work on ffxiv.

may i ask which driver and settings u use?

Current Release Driver
Settings from the top down for ffxivgame.exe
AA: Override 8x
Anisotropic Filtering: Use App Settings=unchecked 8x
Tessellation: AMD Optimized
Catalyst AI: Quality, Enable Surface Format Optimizations=checked
Wait for refresh: On unless otherwise specified
Anti-Aliasing Mode: Multi-Sample
Triple Buffering: Checked (it makes no difference in this as it's not OpenGL)

Radeon Pro: You can force triple buffering, and a few other optimizations that may find you a few more FPS