Extremely long load times

Just wondering if this is common for NA players. My character is on Aegis and I get load times ranging from 2 minutes - 5 minutes at it's worst. Needless to say, this gets very frustrating considering that the game has to load areas, characters, and NPC's frequently.

I did just upgrade a few parts of my machine though and I don't recall ever having load times anywhere near this long beforehand. Maybe it's possible that FFXIV doesn't communicate well with the new generation Intel Processors?

Damn still no input?

Well I tested the game on my laptop and it runs fine so I now know the problem isn't with the servers.

On my desktop though, the game still takes forever to do simple things like load up NPCs, load their dialogue, using the airship takes no less than 5 minutes (of a completely black screen), I tend to run into unloaded areas frequently that are bare of either textures or are "blank" for lack of a better word, it can take up to 2 minutes for my map to load, crafting can sometimes make the game bug out... One good thing I found though is that while the game is lagged while I'm opening a treasure chest, the game gives me items for every time I clicked during the lag, though it only lagged once on the chests so far. I got a few circlets from it when it finally loaded.

My laptop is an Intel C2D 2.1ghz with a 4650m and 4gb DDR3 ram, W7H using older catalyst drivers.

My desktop is an Intel 3570k with a 5870 and 8gb DDR3 (2133 OC) RAM, W7P using the latest catalyst drivers.

I guess I'll have to do some experimenting to isolate the issue. I'll report back with findings in case anyone else runs into this strange bug in the future.

Tried changing graphics settings and downclocking my RAM to default speeds. Nothing working so far. Changing voltage while RAM was OCed had no effect.

The game ran fine before I upgraded my rig which is weird. I was running an AMD build (970 Black) and the only things that changed hardware wise was the motherboard, CPU, and the RAM. Everything else is the same. The game is running off of an enterprise HDD but I doubt that would be an issue as I run all of my games off of that HDD.

Uploading some pics of what I bump into every couple minutes when trying to go from place to place. I then have to wait up to a couple minutes for everything to load before I can proceed. My ports are all allocated, my S and R always read low, but I do sometimes get the red latency icon over my char's head when waiting for things to load despite these things.

http://i46.tinypic.com/23ivx9v.jpg
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Uninstall the game, and when I say uninstall, I mean:

- Uninstall it via the control panel.
- Delete the folder for the game that's in you C:\Program Files folder.
- Delete the \My Games\Final Fantasy XIV folder in your My Documents.
- Reboot
- Download CCleaner (google it) and have it run a registry scrub.
- Reboot
- Defrag your hard drive (unless it's a SSD),
- Reboot
- Reinstall FFXIV

It'll probably take you 2-3 days to do all this, but I bet it solves your problem.

Ok so I took a hint from another thread (http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...t-Game-Crashes) and decided to try running the game in windowed mode... Strangely enough, that remedied the issue. No idea what it is about full screen mode that makes the game screw up so badly. It's a shame too because I really prefer full screen.

Before switching though, the game did screw up in a pretty funny way that I can see as becoming exploitable. If you are running up an incline when the textures and stuff disappear, you stop running up the incline and run along a flat plane through the ground. You can then clip through walls like they weren't there and even craft things and interact with NPCs and pretty much get free shortcuts everywhere. This happened to me in Limsa while going up one of the stairwells and I spent some time running around above people's heads. I eventually got stuck inside an elevator shaft though and had to teleport to get out.

If this happens in a dungeon, I could see being able to cut through it to get to key locations without having to fight or anything.

1. When the game starts to lag and nothing around is loading, start moving up stairs or an incline. This also works in Ul Dah at the front gate. Soon you will just walk through the floor.
http://i45.tinypic.com/2wfr51t.jpg
2. Now You're free to roam above/below a floor. Sometimes the game will freeze for 10-20 secs, but if I just wait, when it unfreezes, the NPCs and other players will have loaded up. If I'm close enough I can do normal interactions with them.
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3. be careful where you decide to hang out though
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4. walking from "inside" a wall into an area that's technically "outside" of a wall will make the wall collision detection kick back in. Blundering into an elevator shaft or the like will trap you there until you use teleport/return to get yourself out.
http://i48.tinypic.com/2mnobyv.jpg

Try a good defrag after patch / install. It might be struggling to pull the textures from the HDD. If your are using an SSD (flash) disregard this advice.

Do you have the specs of your machine? As in more detail? Might wanna throttle back the memory OC and see if that helps.

I noticed you upgraded the motherboard from your previous rig. Did you just plug the old HDD in without reinstalling everything? While you don't absolutely have to, but if you install a new MB, it is good practice to reinstall everying (Windows basically). I do a clean wipe. It clears/prevents many headaches. I mean it is kinda having a spine transplant if you will accept that analogy. The chipsets, memory controllers, HDD controllers, sound etc... is all different. They all need new drivers, and if you just "plug and play" the drivers might crash amongst other settings.

A clean wipe might seem drastic, but what does a few hours of backing up and reinstalling everything compare to months of little problems and troubleshooting. It's just less headache overall. If you have a large second and/or external HDD it is relatively painless to back up. Even more so if you have backup software (though I don't use it since I pretty much have all the settings I need committed to memory).

The clipping issue happens occasionally, and people have exploited it to visit blocked off areas :p I don't think it relates to your problems.

Good luck~

Edit: If you want, you can try driver cleaner and wipe everything and download the newest revision of all your relevant drivers... less drastic measure if you want to try that.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Rhylee_Mau

Try a good defrag after patch / install. It might be struggling to pull the textures from the HDD. If your are using an SSD (flash) disregard this advice.

Do you have the specs of your machine? As in more detail? Might wanna throttle back the memory OC and see if that helps.

I noticed you upgraded the motherboard from your previous rig. Did you just plug the old HDD in without reinstalling everything? While you don't absolutely have to, but if you install a new MB, it is good practice to reinstall everying (Windows basically). I do a clean wipe. It clears/prevents many headaches. I mean it is kinda having a spine transplant if you will accept that analogy. The chipsets, memory controllers, HDD controllers, sound etc... is all different. They all need new drivers, and if you just "plug and play" the drivers might crash amongst other settings.

A clean wipe might seem drastic, but what does a few hours of backing up and reinstalling everything compare to months of little problems and troubleshooting. It's just less headache overall. If you have a large second and/or external HDD it is relatively painless to back up. Even more so if you have backup software (though I don't use it since I pretty much have all the settings I need committed to memory).

The clipping issue happens occasionally, and people have exploited it to visit blocked off areas :p I don't think it relates to your problems.

Good luck~

Edit: If you want, you can try driver cleaner and wipe everything and download the newest revision of all your relevant drivers... less drastic measure if you want to try that.

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Thanks for the input. As I said before though, the problem was remedied by using windowed mode. I had read that people were having problems with constant crashing in full screen mode so I switched it and it runs fine now.

When I upgraded I did a clean install of everything, so that's not the issue. I also made a note of what I tried with the RAM earlier. Played with the voltages and downclocked it to default speeds which also had no effect. My HDD is a WD RE4 that gets defragged every Wednesday so it's almost never over 0% fragmentation so that also can't be the issue. Plus the fact that the game runs fine in windowed mode is pretty telling that the locally stored assets are probably not the issue.

Also the clipping I was only ever able to do when the terrain hadn't loaded to block me.

At any rate, the full specs for this machine are

Intel 3570k (Ivy Bridge) @3.4ghz x4
asrock z77 chipset mobo
8gb DDR3 RAM 1600 default (current setting), 2133 OC @ 11-11-11-9
Radeon 5870 1gb in a pcie20 x16 slot (latest catalyst, D3D 7.14.10.0903) 1440x900 monitor @75hz
Win 7 Ultimate 64bit
500gb 7200rpm WD RE4 enterprise drive

Hello there.

Are you running any kind of background defrag program or such ? Like O&O Defrag ? Because that could cause those issues. Try to stop those just in case.

sounds like a memory leak.

when was the last time you did a registry scrub?

is your laptop also a radeon chipset? i've noticed the radeon tech doesn't run the game as efficiently.

NVID's SLI tech also seems to fail pretty hard when rendering. I can't set anything on high without my machine freaking out if i put it in SLI. on high settings i'll almost always crash within 20 minutes due to overload on the GPU.

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From what I can tell, when in full screen mode it prioritizes resources to to FFXIV, and because the game is so demanding it can force your system to hit it's cap and create a bottle neck. windowed mode seems to be capping resource pull. I had a similar issue in beta and just ran things in windowed mode all the time after i noticed the drastic difference in pull. you can't alt+tab in FS mode currently so it's not surprising the resource allocation changes. but the engine is so inefficient it screws everything else up.

I'm hoping this is fixed i 2.0 with the new engine. I've got a pretty decent rig and would love to put everything on max settings and really enjoy all the hard work SE put into the game to make it look fantastic.

Thanks for the replies.

I don't run any background defrag programs, or anything taxing on the resources. No Antivirus or antimalware software Just Rainmeter and driver controllers for the Video and Sound devices.

"when was the last time you did a registry scrub?"
The rig was just built a little over a month ago. Total format and clean installs.

"is your laptop also a radeon chipset? i've noticed the radeon tech doesn't run the game as efficiently."
Yes it is. The funny thing is that it runs the game nearly as well as my desktop. It could even be considered more stable considering that it can run the game in full screen mode without encountering the issues that my desktop does using near identical settings. The only difference would be the screen size.

"From what I can tell, when in full screen mode it prioritizes resources to to FFXIV"
Now that you mention it, when I was trying to find a fix for the problem, I found this little program that someone made called FFXIV Priority Booster. Link. The guy who made it was having a problem that sounded similar to mine. Quoting his post from the link:

Quote:

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Since I have a CPU bottlenecked computer with a Dual Core processor, I felt really bad when I realized that the game itself is really poorly optimized for us dual core users. It spawns so many threads in the process and takes up all my CPU in no time, even if I have a nice GPU (9800GT).

One thing I realized was that the game itself, when in windowed mode, ran at Low Priority. While trying to fix it, setting it to High, it just kept changing it back to Low with no success.

That's where I decided to code an application to help me out with this task, the FFXIV Priority Booster. All I wanted to do is to keep scanning for the process and put its priority to High (or the one selected by the user). While meddling with the code, I realized I could actually do more! I could manage directly the threads, polling the application itself, and try to improve the performances on us poor Dual Core users.

After some days, working on this, analyzing the underlying threads and processes, I was able to come up with this. Some friends in my steam group / Link shell helped me out beta testing and reporting bugs and they all say the applications helps (in a way or another) with their FPS and smooth gameplay.

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I tried using it but saw no measurable difference in performance, but then again I'm using a quad core processor. The program does what it advertises though. Keeps FFXIV at high priority (or whatever you set it to) and organizes threads.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Ketone

Thanks for the replies.

I don't run any background defrag programs, or anything taxing on the resources. No Antivirus or antimalware software Just Rainmeter and driver controllers for the Video and Sound devices.

"when was the last time you did a registry scrub?"
The rig was just built a little over a month ago. Total format and clean installs.

"is your laptop also a radeon chipset? i've noticed the radeon tech doesn't run the game as efficiently."
Yes it is. The funny thing is that it runs the game nearly as well as my desktop. It could even be considered more stable considering that it can run the game in full screen mode without encountering the issues that my desktop does using near identical settings. The only difference would be the screen size.

"From what I can tell, when in full screen mode it prioritizes resources to to FFXIV"
Now that you mention it, when I was trying to find a fix for the problem, I found this little program that someone made called FFXIV Priority Booster. Link. The guy who made it was having a problem that sounded similar to mine. Quoting his post from the link:



I tried using it but saw no measurable difference in performance, but then again I'm using a quad core processor. The program does what it advertises though. Keeps FFXIV at high priority (or whatever you set it to) and organizes threads.

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I've noticed this problem on my alienware laptop with the 'turbo booster' where it overclocks certain threads to increase performance. i've noticed this doesn't really work as intended for most applications i use. so i turn it off and force it to use the entire chip. it draws more power and produces more heat, but that's why I have a badass cooling pad.

my guess is you may be experiencing something similar. as laptop chipsets behave very differently than desktop counterparts. when in beta I dedicated two cores to FFXIV and set another as a backup and it showed much improved results. my desktop at the time had no problems, all problems i had were purely on my laptop and related to the processor not knowing where to put resources. dedicating two cores helped considerably, but i was always a little afraid i'd blow them out.

For now i would say just hang tight if the game is playable. I'm hoping the new engine for 2.0 alleviates a lot of this. from what i can tell it's optimized for mid-range machines and not high end. I have dual 580s in SLI and they crash whenever i set the game to the highest settings. a single 580 should be able to run the game fine, yet i see issues on anything above standard settings.

how were you measuring performance? using the benchmark utility?

I ran furmark the other day and my system crashed hard. I seem to have some instability somewhere in my system (most likely drivers) i need to find.

edit:

check your HDD too. that's my current bottle neck for the game and the major source of my loading times on my desktop. my laptop has an SSD and loads pretty fast all the time as long as my processor isnt' freaking out

Again though, the issue is not the laptop lol. The laptop runs the game just fine. It's the desktop that's having the issua, and again, only when in full screen mode.

Also, my HDD is an Enterprise class drive that's never over 0% fragmentation. It's also the drive that I run all of my games off of without issue, so that can't be the problem.

I too am hoping that the new engine in 2.0 will fix all the problems, but it seems that the Japanese are having a hell of a time figuring out PC optimisation lol. I'm not just talking about Square-Enix here either.

I'm experiencing these exact same issues, and it just started happening to me yesterday. I didn't change anything on my computer or install anything either. I don't think it's a performance issue because I have a quad core and the game was running absolutely perfect two days ago. Now, I have long load times, the game would just stop randomly and then start back up again a minute later, like it lagged for a whole minute, and maps suddenly just stop loading until I sit there for a minute or two, and then it'll load again. Very frustrating.

Welp it's now happening even in windowed mode. This is so frustrating.

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Originally Posted by Ketone

Again though, the issue is not the laptop lol. The laptop runs the game just fine. It's the desktop that's having the issua, and again, only when in full screen mode.

Also, my HDD is an Enterprise class drive that's never over 0% fragmentation. It's also the drive that I run all of my games off of without issue, so that can't be the problem.

I too am hoping that the new engine in 2.0 will fix all the problems, but it seems that the Japanese are having a hell of a time figuring out PC optimisation lol. I'm not just talking about Square-Enix here either.

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Oh i thought the laptop was the issue. never mind.

. . .ok. so what's the data transfer rate of your enterprise? FFXIV is a different type of game. it's also HORRIBLY inefficient. just because it's enterprise class do not assume it's working as intended. like i said: double check it. you don't' know what you don't know. until you pinpoint where your bottle neck is everything is suspect.

because you're experiencing issues loading issues and not FPS issues it's most likely a data-transfer rate issue. IE: check your router. check your hard-drive. check your processor.

Well everything you suggested was already reported on earlier in the thread, HDD specs included.

SATA 3.0gbps, 7200, 64mb, WD RE4, 0% fragmentation

Router is fine. Ports forwarded, DMZ has no effect. Processor is fine, voltages are fine, not OCed. It gets particularly bad during peak hours. During the "blackouts", there is no PC activity, S and R numbers are low, and then suddenly after some time everything just pops into place. Sometimes I'll be waiting so long for an NPC to load their text after talking to then that I will have to terminate the program in order to move again.

udubdave, can you post your system and OS specs for comparison? Maybe we have a common culprit.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Ketone

Well everything you suggested was already reported on earlier in the thread, HDD specs included.

SATA 3.0gbps, 7200, 64mb, WD RE4, 0% fragmentation

Router is fine. Ports forwarded, DMZ has no effect. Processor is fine, voltages are fine, not OCed. It gets particularly bad during peak hours. During the "blackouts", there is no PC activity, S and R numbers are low, and then suddenly after some time everything just pops into place. Sometimes I'll be waiting so long for an NPC to load their text after talking to then that I will have to terminate the program in order to move again.

udubdave, can you post your system and OS specs for comparison? Maybe we have a common culprit.

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That right there makes me think it's not your system.

compare the two network cards on your laptop and desktop.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Ketone

Well everything you suggested was already reported on earlier in the thread, HDD specs included.

SATA 3.0gbps, 7200, 64mb, WD RE4, 0% fragmentation

Router is fine. Ports forwarded, DMZ has no effect. Processor is fine, voltages are fine, not OCed. It gets particularly bad during peak hours. During the "blackouts", there is no PC activity, S and R numbers are low, and then suddenly after some time everything just pops into place. Sometimes I'll be waiting so long for an NPC to load their text after talking to then that I will have to terminate the program in order to move again.

udubdave, can you post your system and OS specs for comparison? Maybe we have a common culprit.

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Not sure what specs you're looking for but here's all I know:

Intel Core i7 950
4GB RAM
Windows 7 64 bit
ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series
Hitachi HDD 2tb 7200rpm 64mb 6gb/s

Quote:

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Intel Core i7 950
4GB RAM
Windows 7 64 bit
ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series
Hitachi HDD 2tb 7200rpm 64mb 6gb/s

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Ok we have several similarities. Separate HDD for the game, ATI graphics card, 64 bit OS, intel CPU.

What catalyst version are you using? Also, go to performance -> AMD overdrive, and can you tell me if gfx overdrive is enabled? Many card do this by default.

Ok I believe I have finally isolated the issue. It seems to be directly related to the HDD.

I found that whenever the game fails to load assets from said HDD, If I go to manually access files from that drive, the game loads everything up right as I go to access them.

I think this may be an issue with the Western Digital RE4 HDD. If data isn't constantly being read/written to the drive, it tends to go to "sleep", for want of a better term. When this happens, for whatever reason, FFXIV takes ages to get it to "wake up" again... but if I manually "wake" the drive by just accessing some folders on it, the game loads everything instantly after that.

Again though, this is only an issue with FFXIV.

Now I just need to come up with a means of keeping the drive active while I play and I should have no issue. I hear that investing in a SSD would be ideal, but I'll likely write a tiny app that just constantly writes and deletes a 1 byte file or something.