Some performance observations + graphics settings that have an effect

Ok so here are some observations I have made while tweaking various settings.

First thing to note is that the this game is very CPU hungry. If your CPU is not up for it, you will get a fps drop for certain! Turning Hyper Threading on/off doesn't have any noticeable effect. When I turned HT off I saw that all four cores were utilized, 1st and 2nd core around 80% and 3rd and 4th around 50%, in the Coerthas city I was doing my tests in. When I turned HT back on the load was distributed in varying degree on all 8 threads.

Also tried to set affinity to only two cores (they were then used 100%) which resulted in a drastic performance drop. So you really want to at least have a quad core processor for this game. My cpu is i7 3820 @ 4,46GHz and 16GB quad channel ram is running at 1938MHz and it still looks like I could make use of some more CPU power!

About hard disk performance, you naturally get faster loading times with a SDD, but it shouldn't affect the fps too much after the zone and characters are loaded. Since I have some ram overhead, I tested running the entire 9GB game from a ram disk. While that effectively reduces the reading times to something very small, it didn't have much of a effect on the actual game performance. That's mostly due to fact that even with a SDD the loading times are mostly just waiting for the server to transfer your character into different zone. Also running from ram didn't have noticeable effect on the fps drops.

The most important graphic settings are the three first in the list.

"HDR rendering" mainly improves rendering of bright objects, mainly the sun. With it you also get a little better colors out of the lighting, but nothing very noticeable most of the time. If your fps is constantly lower than you'd like, try disabling this.

"Occlusion culling" disables rendering of objects you cannot see, freeing resources. Mostly noticeable in cities and other places where a lot geometry is located in the direction of sight (even if most of it is invisible behind walls etc). It doesn't have any effect on the visual quality and I'd always enable this option.

"Use LOD" does what reads in it's description. Distant objects are rendered in a lower detail thus reducing the rendering load. I was a little surprised to see that this option actually nicely decreases the fps drops seen when you turn the camera/move around.

If you still have trouble when there's a lot characters around you, try hiding the shadows of other NPCs.

I have two 7850s in crossfire... If you are playing on a lower end GPU you might need to reduce the other settings further, however these were the settings I found making the biggest impact on the frame rate. Also if you are suffering from a low performance even on the lowest settings on a decent GPU, the bottleneck is then most likely caused by your CPU.

For me the Catalyst 13.8 beta2 drivers have been working nicely.

Looks like enabling/disabling Frame Pacing doesn't have any effect, which is excepted since this is a DX9 game. For now I'd leave it disabled just in case.

Enabling disabling triple buffering doesn't have any effect and I'd leave it disabled.

Using the high quality texture filtering option doesn't have any impact on the fps for me.

Also running firefox-youtube in the background doesn't have any effect on the fps for me.

This game (like any) should run better in the fullwindow mode.

Have you noticed these same things or do you have better info? Please post http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/i...ies/tongue.png

The game is quite CPU demanding, but mainly only when lots of characters are on screen. Disabling physics and shadows improves CPU load for anyone limited here.

The culling feature doesn't make any performance difference for me, but as all video cards feature extensive Z culling in hardware this isn't surprising.

The game engine forces triple buffering (unless you remove the frame limiter) and the AMD setting for this only applies to OpenGL anyway.

Great advice!

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Originally Posted by Tam3n

I have two 7850s in crossfire... If you are playing on a lower end GPU you might need to reduce the other settings further, however these were the settings I found making the biggest impact on the frame rate. Also if you are suffering from a low performance even on the lowest settings on a decent GPU, the bottleneck is then most likely caused by your CPU.

For me the Catalyst 13.8 beta2 drivers have been working nicely.

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I found that if you don't use the beta drivers with the HD 7850 it makes the game unplayable in almost every setting except bare minimum, however with the beta drivers I was easily able to run maximum @ 60 fps with a single 7850.

CPU: i5-2500k (OC 4.8ghz)
GPU: Evga Nvidia GTX 760
Resolution: 2560X1440

With my setup above, I find my GPU to be my bottleneck, I need another one for SLI and I won't have any issues, but until then, I average 45+ fps in most areas on High Desktop settings with most of what you've listed set and it runs well for me. I have max view distance too.

Sitting on top of the tower in Carthaes Highlands and being able to see people running around on chocobos a mile away is probably about one of the most beautiful in game views I've ever seen in any game to date.

There are very few games that utilize hyperthreading. In theory, you should see comparable benchmarks i5 vs i7, maybe off by 1k or less depending on background applications running. The performance increase jumping to SLI for single monitor is not that great to be honest. SLI isn't really worth it unless you are running multiple monitors. Even then, a single GTX 680 is going to run the game fine at max settings. The visual improvement bumping up to 2560x1440 is pretty nice, but I may switch to 2 1920x1080 monitors soon. I've done triple screen gaming in the past and for a game like this it's a vast improvement. Chat windows, map and other UI junk really eat up the screen real estate and you don't see a lot of the really pretty stuff in-game going on behind it all.

7970ghz@ 1150mhz wich actually is one of the most powerfull gpu (only gtx780 and Titan are better) and game still have perf issues, btw game is running perfect at maximum when there is not many people around.
I think we need drivers, we got to wait, AMD is collaborating with SE.

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Originally Posted by DarkBahamut

The game is quite CPU demanding, but mainly only when lots of characters are on screen. Disabling physics and shadows improves CPU load for anyone limited here.

The culling feature doesn't make any performance difference for me, but as all video cards feature extensive Z culling in hardware this isn't surprising.

The game engine forces triple buffering (unless you remove the frame limiter) and the AMD setting for this only applies to OpenGL anyway.

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Well, for me enabling occlusion culling does have an effect (according to wikipedia, pre computed visibility zones are used to clip invisible regions) :)
Also I frankly didn't notice any difference between enabling/disabling physics in either performance or the character animations.

Btw has anyone been able to confirm if the radial blur option actually does something?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Ryios

CPU: i5-2500k (OC 4.8ghz)
GPU: Evga Nvidia GTX 760
Resolution: 2560X1440

With my setup above, I find my GPU to be my bottleneck, I need another one for SLI and I won't have any issues, but until then, I average 45+ fps in most areas on High Desktop settings with most of what you've listed set and it runs well for me. I have max view distance too.

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This game at 2560x1440 is very gpu heavy. I run the same cpu and a gtx 780 and it drops to 45-50 at times @ 2560x1440.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Bizly

Great advice!



I found that if you don't use the beta drivers with the HD 7850 it makes the game unplayable in almost every setting except bare minimum, however with the beta drivers I was easily able to run maximum @ 60 fps with a single 7850.

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Yes, I found exactly the same thing. If you read what is different with the current beta drivers, it will say something like 'improved crossfire compatibility with FFXIV:ARR'. Using the current formal release version I found that I was crashing constantly. But with the beta it is pretty smooth and I expect when it goes non-beta it should be even better.

Currently there are problems with SLI and multi-monitor, you take a big hit on performance.

I have 2 gtx580's in SLI and 3 monitors giving me 5760x1200 game resolution. In 1.0 I could run max settings like this, but now I have to resort to low laptop settings, which is definitely not as it should be. The game doesn't look bad, but it definitely could look better. Also affects the draw distance as well. A single gtx580 runs the game at max on a single 1920x1200 monitor at 60fps and 80% gpu usage. On max with SLI enabled for nvidia surround, I get 10fps at most, if I go around water, 1fps and I can't move.

I have an intel i7 950, and at most I see 15-20% cpu usage, so I'm pretty pleased with that performance. I even have it set to use CPU for physics. However, my Q6600 sees 80-90% cpu usage for basic settings with a gtx 280, so making the step to the i7 series makes a huge difference.

I don't gain any fps on my 7970x2 in crossfire. So windowed mode runs better for me. Teleporting some times fps drop to 1 and game crash out. Been happening more. Not cooling since everything is watercooled. Amd needs tweak the driver more cause benchmark And real game are way different.

Oddly enough I get higher frames when holding down the camera button (Right Click), I wish I knew why...

Keep in mind also that they still need to optimize the game (no it's not fully optimized yet) and that better drivers need to be released from both nVidia and ATi for this game.

i7 3770k OC'ed @ 5.0GHz
SLI x2 EVGA GTX 780 ACX Superclocked @ 1200MHz / 6800MHz (custom OCTI vBios)
Ripjaws 16 gigs of RAM @ 1866
Samsung SSD 840 Pro
Everything watercooled.

I clearly have something that is goddamn overkill for this game, and should run it at 60 FPS locked at all time on Maximum Presets (doing it most of the time), but when I get in cities and some parts of the world it can drop as low as 30-35 FPS.

So yeah wait for better drivers, our rigss are not the culprits and we don't have bottlenecks, we just need better drivers / optimization. :)

I find this all very interesting. I myself have a very nice computer for playing the game and am extremely pleased with the results. Even in extremely crowded areas I'm always at 60fps (Although there is this one wall in Ul'dah that will grind me down to 10fps if I look at it...)

I'm honestly surprised by some of the comments from people with PCs that would eat mine alive, and to find out they actually have problems o_o

My choice in PC setups is:
i7 3770k (Overclocked to 4.6ghz)
24gb of Kingston HyperX Blu Memory @ 1600mhz
Samsung 830 SSD 250gb
ASUS GTX 670 4GB (at stock speeds)

I found just the opposite of the OP really. Running the game at Max settings my GPU is always reporting 99-100% usage, while my CPU is reporting 15-27% usage.
I can also run FRAPS at max resolution and still maintain 60fps in game.

For people having FPS problems but still wanting to run at "mostly" Max settings, I found on my older PCs that turning off other people's shadows and disabling the rendering of objects outside my line of sight gave me a pretty big boost to fps (about 15-20).

*EDIT*

I forgot to mention I'm running the latest beta drivers which seem to have had a HUGE impact on my performance.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Urobulusff

Keep in mind also that they still need to optimize the game (no it's not fully optimized yet) and that better drivers need to be released from both nVidia and ATi for this game.

i7 3770k OC'ed @ 5.0GHz
SLI x2 EVGA GTX 780 ACX Superclocked @ 1200MHz / 6800MHz (custom OCTI vBios)
Ripjaws 16 gigs of RAM @ 1866
Samsung SSD 840 Pro
Everything watercooled.

I clearly have something that is goddamn overkill for this game, and should run it at 60 FPS locked at all time on Maximum Presets (doing it most of the time), but when I get in cities and some parts of the world it can drop as low as 30-35 FPS.

So yeah wait for better drivers, our rigss are not the culprits and we don't have bottlenecks, we just need better drivers / optimization. :)

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I have pretty much the same set up and I'm also experiencing those weird drops in FPS, on the geforce forums people with 780 have reported this problem also, so maybe soon we'll get new drivers

I would like to see better scaling of SLI. I have latest Nvidia beta drivers, and 3 way GTX 480's in SLI. I can max out Crysis 3 constant 60 fps, but I get frame drops in this game. I understand having tons of players in cities is simply demanding no matter the hardware, but with SLI off and on I dont see enough of a difference. Im waiting for some good benchmarks for the game to come.

anyone know if a q6700 OCed to 3.33 with load temps at 60C would bottleneck my msi gtx560ti hawk?

i play on everything high...and get around 30-60fps on some places and 20 fps in cities.

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Originally Posted by Craniux

anyone know if a q6700 OCed to 3.33 with load temps at 60C would bottleneck my msi gtx560ti hawk?

i play on everything high...and get around 30-60fps on some places and 20 fps in cities.

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Wow, that's an old CPU these days.

The answer is yes I'm afraid. I have a PC with a Q9300 at 2.5ghz and when I upgraded my GT 9800 to a GTX 570 I was always wondering why it seemed to give me the same performance as before the upgrade.
Turns out the GPU could only ever use a max of 50-60% of it's power because of the CPU. I eventually built a PC with a AMD Phenom II X6 CPU and the GTX 570 had a chance to show it's true potential.

The culling option can cause visible objects to be culled as well if the camera position moves such that the camera is looking from the inside of a backface-culled object to something on its outside. Happens when panning around with tree branches nearby.

It sure would be swell if they added a supersampling antialising option -- all FXAA does is make the jagged edges blurry!

EDIT: I tried the culling option again, since I turned it off when I noticed the problem in open beta. It now seems to be working fine after a short test.

I have:

i7-3820 @ 4.3GHz
32GB Quad channel RAM @ 1600MHz
2 480's in SLi running duel monitors @ 1080p
256GB SSD

I run at max settings boarder-less windowed and it never drops below 45 FPS in city's but in most places it's always running at 90+. I have a 120Hz monitor I use as my gaming screen to stop any tearing and the game looks absolutely amazing. I run the game from RAM too which barely makes a difference on load times but it is noticeable. FATE's don't give me an issue either even if there are hundreds of people around spamming their abilities.

Going on what other people are saying it sounds like I'm pretty lucky and have a very stable system. I've been running the game from RAM since the get go though, so maybe that's helping. I'll have to do some testing when I'm next online to see if running off the SSD causes FPS drops like others with similar setups are describing.

*edit* forgot to mention I run at max settings boarder-less windowed.

i7 980X 4.2ghz
12 GB Corsair 2000Mhz w/Cooling unit
2x GTX 580 SLi
2x 128Gb SSD [Raid 0] [Game is installed here]
4x 1.5Tb hdd
3x LG Flatron IPS234 23" running 5760*1080 Res

Running the game at 5760*1080 max settings [driver defaults/no forced settings] i get 45-60FPS constantly, even in crazy FATES with tons of people i never really go below 40 FPS. The game is way more dependent on CPU then GPU.

Screenshot at a busy FATE
Screenshot wall [Gallery] 5760*1080 Resolution

Ok, few updates.

The 13.10 beta drivers have been working just as well as the 13.8 beta2 drivers, so it's safe to use them.

I like to listen BGM from youtube for a change sometimes. However I noticed I was more prone to crash sooner or later when I did that. I disabled hardware acceleration in Flashplayer and Firefox and have been fine since then :)

One little thing to note is that there's stutter every time you hover your mouse pointer over a NPC. That's why I usually like to keep mine in the upper corner to avoid this as much as possible.