High end computer getting low FPS in city.

Hello everyone!

I am currently experiencing city fps drops. In the wild im running at 80-120 FPS. When I go to limsa or any major city with a larger exposed area of players it dips down to as low as 30 fps, the average being 40. When I pan my camera around the other way it will go back up.

MY system:

i5-3570k OC'd to 4.7ghz cooled with H70 liquid (50c under load)
Nvidia Geforce 680 GTX
MSI z77A-GD65 military class III
8GB gskill x 1866mhz
128 Corsair SSD Read: 550mb/s Write: 520mb/s

Any help with this issue would be great, its extremely annoying to have a $1500 system and not be able to play it correctly. The optimization in this game seems to be bad.

Still looking for a solution, bump :D

I'm in the same boat running a crossfire setup - 100fps+ in the field, 30-40 in the city/near atherytes. It happens to everyone - I've a friend running a Geforce Titan and even he drops into the 40's in these locations. Frankly, 99% of people who says they get a constant 60+ fps are lying to not only us but themselves right now (benching in an open field with no PC's around and getting 100+ fps doesn't count as an honest indication of performance). Also, the benchmark is more or less irrelevant tbh as although it shows you can play the game the performance displayed is inaccurate.

Its most likely the result of CPU handling than GPU raw power (trolls - notice I wrote 'handling' and not bottlenecking etc). Hopefully future optimisations will even things out a bit more.

Personally, I'm sat on the edge of my seat waiting for decent crossfire drivers - Although I love the high fps at times, Towns and Atherytes are actually running worse with crossfire enabled right now :(

i7 3770k @ 5ghz
GTX 780 SLI @ 1071/6500

You're not the only person experiencing weird FPS issues. I have a system that should be easily capable of running any setting I want. There are a lot of unoptimized areas and SLI doesn't even work properly 90% of the time. Also introduces weird micro stutters and slowdown.

It's the game not you. Trust me.

That's typical for most MMO's.. framerate will always drop in town due to the amount of players. You probably have the same issues when in a zerg doing Fates,etc..Your processor can only handle so many animations. It's more of a hardware limitation than coding. 30-50fps in town is not a big deal.That's pretty good considering lol..Really, few games if any are going to get you max fps in towns. My suggestion is to get used to it.. not going to improve much but that's just my opinion and advice from experience. Good luck ;)

Thats so weird, I have a friend who has a similar system, just with the 770 gtx and seems to run at 60 FPS in town consistantly (ive seen it at his place) SO I have no idea what it is. I know he has an asus 87z pro MB, i5-4670k @ 4.7ghz, 8gb of 1866 ram and the 770gtx. So I just dont understand it.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Dovienya

That's typical for most MMO's.. framerate will always drop in town due to the amount of players. You probably have the same issues when in a zerg doing Fates,etc..Your processor can only handle so many animations. It's more of a hardware limitation than coding. 30-50fps in town is not a big deal.That's pretty good considering lol..Really, few games if any are going to get you max fps in towns. My suggestion is to get used to it.. not going to improve much but that's just my opinion and advice from experience. Good luck ;)

---

It's not a CPU issue if CPU usage isn't above 60%.

Been this way for every MMORPG. It's not bad optimization , it's because there's tens of people on screen at once.
Even WoW slows down on high end computers when there's alot going on.
Im on a 760 and get about 30-40fps in the towns when they are busy.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by stuntdubs

Been this way for every MMORPG. It's not bad optimization , it's because there's tens of people on screen at once.
Even WoW slows down on high end computers when there's alot going on.
Im on a 760 and get about 30-40fps in the towns when they are busy.

---

That's not an excuse. There has to be a reason why it is like this. CPU and GPU usage isn't even maxed when this happens.

There is no fix. There never will be. Accept it.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Syx

There is no fix. There never will be. Accept it.

---

There better be a fix. This game should be SLI/crossfire optimized. I can play much more taxing games on my computer and still be above 60+ fps but I randomly drop all the way down to 14 fps.Not even in towns...I can be standing in one place and my fps just drops. They need to fix this.

This just started happening to me too. Last weekend I would get great framerates in a city, now it's way down. The number of people on screen hasn't changed since last week, so it's something new.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by samfisher

It's not a CPU issue if CPU usage isn't above 60%.

---

Wrong. The game barely uses more than one CPU core. If you have a Hyperthreaded i7, you'll never see the CPU meter go above 12.5% on the ffxiv process because it simply doesn't use the other cores at the same time. Albeit I'll give them credit for not being horrible about it. Other games I played also top out one cpu core, and completely screw up rendering the second any lag is encountered.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Aiyza

There better be a fix. This game should be SLI/crossfire optimized. I can play much more taxing games on my computer and still be above 60+ fps but I randomly drop all the way down to 14 fps.Not even in towns...I can be standing in one place and my fps just drops. They need to fix this.

---

You can't ever guarantee a SLI/Crossfire setup will work, as most peoples systems do not actually have the bandwidth required to utilize the second video card (SLI usually takes a x16 and a x4 and switches them into x8 and x8 mode) without crippling the first one. If the game is being limited by the PCIe lanes, then the Crossfire setup will not be any better.

You actually need a very expensive computer rig to use two,three or four GPU's at maximum speed, by which by that time you're probably spent 600$ per video card and 2000$ on the CPU's. Trust me it's overkill.

If the game achieves 30fps@1920x1080, then the game is operating as intended. If you get more, than you have a nice video card.

As for FPS dropping in cities and in fields/FATE's, yes it does happen a bit, and this happens in other MMO's as well, it's usually not the video card but part of the networking code being in the rendering loop that results in the problem.

Area: Revenant's Toll @ Crystal
CPU: i7 4770K @ 4.5GHz ~ 40% CPU Utilization
GPU: GTX680 SLI ~ 60-70% GPU Utilization
Screen Resolution: 2560x1440
FPS: 35-40
Graphics Setting: Maximum Preset
No matter what you do, it will always dip because the CPU can not tell the GPU's to draw the people fast enough. It is CPU bound when it comes to people. I overclocked from 4.5GHz to 4.7GHz just because I was curious and saw an increase of about 3-5FPS. So if you want more FPS, get a faster CPU. The game is not coded to make use of every CPU core. Someone said it was coded for only 1, I doubt that, I'm thinking more like 4 cores, but that is beside the point. There is no fix other than faster CPU speeds.

It is also compounded by latency issues and such over the web. The server has to relay the positioning and such for all moving models on your screen--be that players, NPC's, Minions, Chocobo's, Monsters, etc--everything that you and/or other players might interact with requires a response from the server since it is not managed client side and then synched.

It's a combination of a LOT of things adding up to a slow down in heavily congested areas, and not all of it is bound to your platform's hardware.

I am no expert in such matters...but perhaps this is neither caused by GPU CPU nor RAM, but the usual suspect: Harddisk read writes.
Again, I am not really sure, just speculating:
Everytime when you go into a town, certainly all the static models (such as buildings, NPC, etc) are already pre-loaded into memory during the loading screen. However, this does not apply to players, for a simple reason: no way to predict who will suddenly pops in your screen in an MMO.

Most likely, the FPS loss in city is due to many players going in and out of your "range" at all times, and the PC is reading HDD for all kinds of model, texture and animations (character, hair, weapon, outfit, pets, you name it...).

My "prove" of this:
In Old Gridania, try to approach the market place from the Lancer's Guild.
Around Lancer's Guild, not much people, FPS is smooth.
Run towards market place at the south, start to get stuttering, but press onwards.
Once your "range" covers the majority of market place, majority of the other players are already loaded, the FPS climbs back up again.

If all character models and outfits are pre-loaded into memory, then perhaps with very good GPU CPU & RAM, the FPS will always be high.
But obviously, this is not the case in MMORPG.

I believe there's a way to achieve smooth FPS in cities, through RAM Disk.
What RAM Disk does: loads all the game files into RAM, so that whenever some file is needed, it will search RAM instead of HDD.
So if someone with over 16GB RAM tries out RAM Disk and share the result, perhaps we will know if HDD is truly the bottleneck.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

Wrong. The game barely uses more than one CPU core. If you have a Hyperthreaded i7, you'll never see the CPU meter go above 12.5% on the ffxiv process because it simply doesn't use the other cores at the same time. Albeit I'll give them credit for not being horrible about it. Other games I played also top out one cpu core, and completely screw up rendering the second any lag is encountered.



You can't ever guarantee a SLI/Crossfire setup will work, as most peoples systems do not actually have the bandwidth required to utilize the second video card (SLI usually takes a x16 and a x4 and switches them into x8 and x8 mode) without crippling the first one. If the game is being limited by the PCIe lanes, then the Crossfire setup will not be any better.

You actually need a very expensive computer rig to use two,three or four GPU's at maximum speed, by which by that time you're probably spent 600$ per video card and 2000$ on the CPU's. Trust me it's overkill.

If the game achieves 30fps@1920x1080, then the game is operating as intended. If you get more, than you have a nice video card.

As for FPS dropping in cities and in fields/FATE's, yes it does happen a bit, and this happens in other MMO's as well, it's usually not the video card but part of the networking code being in the rendering loop that results in the problem.

---

If it barely uses one core, that one core should be pretty high up in usage, not middling as it is now.

SLI/Crossfire does NOT need x16 PCIE3 for full bandwidth. You can go all the way down to x4 3.0 with barely any difference. Pump it up to 3-GPUs then you might need x8. There's nothing that saturates x16 PCIE3 yet.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by WhoIsTheGuest

I am no expert in such matters...but perhaps this is neither caused by GPU CPU nor RAM, but the usual suspect: Harddisk read writes.
Again, I am not really sure, just speculating:
Everytime when you go into a town, certainly all the static models (such as buildings, NPC, etc) are already pre-loaded into memory during the loading screen. However, this does not apply to players, for a simple reason: no way to predict who will suddenly pops in your screen in an MMO.

Most likely, the FPS loss in city is due to many players going in and out of your "range" at all times, and the PC is reading HDD for all kinds of model, texture and animations (character, hair, weapon, outfit, pets, you name it...).

My "prove" of this:
In Old Gridania, try to approach the market place from the Lancer's Guild.
Around Lancer's Guild, not much people, FPS is smooth.
Run towards market place at the south, start to get stuttering, but press onwards.
Once your "range" covers the majority of market place, majority of the other players are already loaded, the FPS climbs back up again.

If all character models and outfits are pre-loaded into memory, then perhaps with very good GPU CPU & RAM, the FPS will always be high.
But obviously, this is not the case in MMORPG.

I believe there's a way to achieve smooth FPS in cities, through RAM Disk.
What RAM Disk does: loads all the game files into RAM, so that whenever some file is needed, it will search RAM instead of HDD.
So if someone with over 16GB RAM tries out RAM Disk and share the result, perhaps we will know if HDD is truly the bottleneck.

---

I'm on an SSD :) Still lags. Also AMD drivers are totally crap.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by samfisher

If it barely uses one core, that one core should be pretty high up in usage, not middling as it is now.

SLI/Crossfire does NOT need x16 PCIE3 for full bandwidth. You can go all the way down to x4 3.0 with barely any difference. Pump it up to 3-GPUs then you might need x8. There's nothing that saturates x16 PCIE3 yet.

I'm on an SSD :) Still lags. Also AMD drivers are totally crap.

---

The easiest way to prove the CPU core thing is to uncheck all but two cores. You'll immediately see the two cores you didn't uncheck hit just a little over 50% and the rest will drop to near zero. That is how you know a game is only using one CPU core. I have yet to see a game functionally use more than two cores, and most of the time it's one core almost everything, while the second, third and fourth cores are running threads that don't take up more than 1% of the performance. Playing back audio hasn't been CPU intensive since 1999. The game should push physics off onto other cores (since that's something that actually benefits from it) but nope, it's not doing that either.