FFXIV locking up my PC during gameplay.

Hello Tech Support community,

I have a little knowledge when it comes to PC, so let me preface this with a story about what I have done so far and the exact problem.

Current problem:

When playing FFXIV Windowed or Full Screen - the game will stop and my character will stop in place. My PC "Thinking" light will go red - and will remain red as if processing something and nothing further will render on my screen.

Variances in the issue:

1.) Sometimes the game will 'catch up' and rubber band me to where I was headed. It will usually lock up again but sometimes I can play with no further issue. I do notice screen tearing on full screen - not seen in windowed.

2.) I have not had a 'lock up' outside of a major city that I can recall.

3.) Music will continue to play - and I can still talk to people in Teamspeak, Mumble, etc using my Push To Talk button.

4.) If I Alt-Tab to crash my game intentionally, it takes on average 20-30 minutes for the PC/Game to register that and (eventually) crash.

What I think the issue is:

I think it's my SSD and/or the way FFXIV is interacting with it. I have an OSZ Petrol 120gb - a few months ago I had to do a destructive flash update to upgrade firmware and do a full reinstall. The problem I am having now used to happen before doing anything (browsing, other games, etc) - Currently the problem ONLY HAPPENS when I play FFXIV... I have not been able to replicate the freezing outside of FFXIV. I'm not sure what is unique about FFXIV compared to other games, applications etc - but I use Steam, WoW, LoL and tons of other stuff and they run like a dream.

It seems to happen in Ul'dah when I'm running into the main part of town. I'm wondering if it's just too much information, or maybe my FFXIV DL is corrupt or something - but I'm at my wits ends with this issue.

I opened a support ticket with OCZ but I have a feeling that's going to fruitless, so I wanted to ask the community here if anyone had ever seen anything like this or had any ideas on what I could try... so I can play!

Stuff I have done:

A.) My SSD Firmware is .1 behind the current version - I did update it a few months ago.
B.) BIOS is up to date.

C.) All drivers are up to date.

D.) I disabled all background applications while playing (antivirus, etc - I use Avast!) - noticed no difference.

*** read this one! ***

E.) I read an obscure article about USB devices causing issues with SSDs - in fact when I first had the issue months ago, my PC would not even shut down. I found out it wouldn't shut down because my IPHONE charger cased my PC to go into an infinite loop because it could not read the USB device and unplugging it fixed the shutting down part. I do use a PS3 controller with the MotionJoy application (a signed driver now) - but everything else is normal. So I've been contemplating if one of my USB devices is causing some sort of problem.. but not sure how it would only be FFXIV if that was the case.

F.) I haven't tried playing with all graphics turned down - I may try that right now. I'm wondering if I turn down the draw distance/quality/(shadows already off) if that would somehow prevent it from locking.


Anyway, just looking for some insight.. If needed I can post my System Information into here, but the base of it is: BIOSTAR MB, AMD FX4100, OCZ Petrol SSD, AMD Radeon 6800, 8G Ram.

I have the same issue, but my HDD isn't solid state. It's an enterprise class RE4.

I also get the "frozen lockup" pretty much every time I tele to uldah. When I run from the aether crystal towards the quicksands, by the time I reach that 1st vendor, I always freeze and it takes maybe 20 seconds for the game to catch up, and sometimes, though rarely, it will crash.

I also get a whole host of other freezing issues and assets not loading though. The only hardware similarities we share are ATi GPUs and the amount of RAM. Also using w7 64.

The funny thing is that I have a laptop that runs ffxiv fine that uses an older onboard ATi GPU with outdated drivers. It could be a driver issue but I haven't explored that avenue yet.

it's the radeon card. the drivers are not optimized for FFXIV. its that or your processor can't keep up with loading all the PCs. but i'd put money it's the radeon card. looking through the forums radeon are not very compatible with the current FFXIV engine.

in town: is the highest load on the card because of all the PCs running around. these areas will always have the highest load.

Is there a way to alleviate that load?

On a side note: OCZ has agreed to RMA my Petrol and replace it with an Agility 4 series. I imagine they were put out of commission for some of the very reasons I've been struggling.

From what I understand of the limited control players have on their own Interface and the graphical options of FFXIV, the only way to "Lighten the Load" on the card, is to lower your graphical settings. Unfortunately, to my knowledge, We don't have an NPC / PC number limiter, for FFxIV, so the best you can hope for, is that by lowering your graphical settings it'll kill the speed at which those PC/NPCs load. It's one of the options that SE needs to add into the configuration tool for 2.0 at least in my opinion.

Well, two things..

I'm going to replace the SSD anyway, no reason not too I suppose.

And lowering my graphic settings 1 'notch' so to speak.. (1 below Standard) and I've not locked up yet. I expect it wont be the last time, but being able to run through Ul'dah without locking up was nice tonight.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Onisake

it's the radeon card. the drivers are not optimized for FFXIV. its that or your processor can't keep up with loading all the PCs. but i'd put money it's the radeon card. looking through the forums radeon are not very compatible with the current FFXIV engine.

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Looking thru the forums is not the most accurate way of determining the source of a technical problem. I am going to go ahead and state It's most likely not the Radeon Card!

I am going to quickly ask what filesystem is the drive formatted as? I assume NTFS as it should but it possibly could be FAT or ExFAT. If you don't know don't worry cuz it's unlikely to be something other than NTFS.

Because your drive was having issues with other applications prior to updating the drive firmware I have to suspect it's the drive. Even after the firmware update it's possible the problem may still exhibit the problem. Especially if the firmware attempts to mask a defect in the drive.

Bear in mind the FFXIV folder contains a whopping 150,000 or so individual files. Far more than what is commonly expected.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Laraul

Looking thru the forums is not the most accurate way of determining the source of a technical problem. I am going to go ahead and state It's most likely not the Radeon Card!

I am going to quickly ask what filesystem is the drive formatted as? I assume NTFS as it should but it possibly could be FAT or ExFAT. If you don't know don't worry cuz it's unlikely to be something other than NTFS.

Because your drive was having issues with other applications prior to updating the drive firmware I have to suspect it's the drive. Even after the firmware update it's possible the problem may still exhibit the problem. Especially if the firmware attempts to mask a defect in the drive.

Bear in mind the FFXIV folder contains a whopping 150,000 or so individual files. Far more than what is commonly expected.

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and that's why lowering the graphics settings helped >.>;; sure. it's not the card.

no matter how you look at it, the radeon drivers are not optimized. period. for this reason it should always be suspected first. if you look through the TS forums and 80% of rendering problems are associated with one set of hardware, it is safe to assume that the hardware has issues and the drivers are not optimized. when you check the official forums of the brand and see the exact same thing: you can take it to the bank. i cannot think of a more accurate way to determine the source of a technical problem without physically being behind someone else's PC. enlighten me please if you know of another way.

he's got a bottle neck somewhere. that much is obvious. lowering the load on the GPU (IE: graphical settings) and now he doesn't lock up. it's possible that he fixed a symptom of the true bottle neck, but i'm still banking it's the GPU.

He's got a decent mobo. processor should be able to handle the load (unless he has a ton of background apps). it could be the SSD, but the variances do not suggest this. For his symptoms I would recommend looking at processor=>GPU=>power/voltages/ram=>SSD. the GPU is the most likely culprit, because it's ALWAYS the most likely culprit. even more so because 1) it's radeon 2) radeon drivers are not optimized for FFXIV

Just found the problem. It's not the graphics card or it's drivers at all, as it turns out. It's absolutely a hard drive issue.

This took me probably a month to isolate the problem. I can even max my graphics again, not that lowering them helped me in any noticeable way to begin with.

Run the game in windowed mode. When you see the game lock up and not laoding assets, go browse some folders on the HDD that FFXIV is on. For me, I have a large folder of various images and wallpapers set to "large icon". Just scrolling through that folder instantly gets the game to load up everything.

I made a post about it here.

Can OP confirm?

It doesn't look like he has multiple drives like you do. I'm not convinced that's the problem. It could be, but it's just less intuitive. especially since the problem is in high-load areas. Also curious why you don't have the drives raided?

OP here has a SSD. an HDD has a disk that must spin. the HDD going into 'sleep' mode means the disk isn't spinning as fast, or at all. SSD doesn't have that problem. the USB looping issue could be part of it but he'd have to test that independently. (play a week with controller, play a week without and see if there is a difference)

it really helps when you guys post your FULL system specs. we really need to see everything to get a clear picture.

I've been playing and testing this method for probably a week now. It's 100% successful for me. I've even found a much more practical solution than writing a program to keep the drive active. I just open up one of the images in my pictures folder on that drive with windows photo viewer, and set it to 'slide show'. It then automatically opens a new image every ~4 seconds. It's silly that this has to be done to get the game working properly, but works like a charm so I'm happy.

Yes I had similar issue with ocz ssd after a firmware. Usually happens when windows turns off the drive to save power. It's a firmware issue as I've tried everything and rolling back the firmware was the only solution.