Quote Originally Posted by worldofneil View Post
Ah I see your logic, but no, like in FFXI all characters are rendered on the fly (or at least if they are cached, it's only in memory), there's definitely no disk caching involved Same for the environments, it loads enough of what's around you into RAM (explaining the ~1GB the game can use at times) and I believe it loads/releases more as you move around.

It does however write out the character data to disk every time your change your gear (and possibly when the condition degrades) to the My Games\FINAL FANTASY XIV - A REALM REBORN folder, although this data is pretty tiny and compared to the amount of writes Windows itself does (especially when it uses the pagefile), this game isn't really anything to worry about.
I'm not entirely sure it's rendered on the fly. If it is, they could see a big performance boost from cacheing the models. That would make sense why, on my girlfriend's computer, the game comes to a screeching halt during large fates with lots of players participating. There's also the LOD cache that does exist (it's in the options) but I don't know if it's memory or disk cache.