High end system, still lowish FPS

[Chumeia]

For what its worth, those of you on Vista or Windows 7 can add all kinds of nifty monitoring gadgets to your desktop. If you have multiple monitors this works great.

I have one for GPU, System (cores/ram), Network, Hard Drive, weather and time. There are a pair of support programs that augment temp readouts and virtual memory by adding sensor kit software to the mix. So all in all I can see everything happening with out about 1 second lag from the sensors. Well all but Shader core and Video Ram... but that's another story.

What I have observed with my i3-560 and ATI 4650, is that my Hard drive is generating allot of lag as I walk in town. In-fact in town the demand on the GPU drops to about 35%. The lobby server locked me out and I cannot login, I see 21% on a black screen. GPU @ 109 and fan 12%.

Now aside from the issue a hard drive can cause when it has to keep pulling data to display the screen, so to can a network cause lag. Infact in many MMORPG the network cuases more lag than the hardware especialy when your in a buisy location.

You can always turn down or off the graphics. But the network and HDD accesses are pretty much fixed for you.

I agree a high end system should be able to brave the waters. Unfortunately its not as simple as get the best and win the battle. I have been through this with a Microsoft flight sim nut who refused to listen when our shop told him that his SLI was not able to handle his Flight Sim on High. We would fix the comp and he would call and complain that it didn't work and he was angry. We told him not to adjust the settings, which he always did because he believed the combined power should be more than enough to play the game on High. To bad, Microsoft Flight Sim... NOT COMPATIBLE with SLI.

The lesson I want you to take is that just because you have the best there is doesn't make you a GOD. If it doesn't work, realize that there's a reason for this. It might be the Hard drive, it might be your network, it might even be the software is not yet fully compatible with your hardware. Take a breath. Quit the game. Reduce your settings. Enjoy the game like he rest of us, just for a little while. I am sure a patch will come soon enough and you can test out your power then.

[Kohta]

It might surprize you to know but it's a simple fix, you would think i wouldn't lag with my rig (below) but before i upgraded my Platter HDD to an SSD, it made a HUGE differance. The sluggish framerates were due to my HDD constantly looking for information as characters, PC/NPC were showing up as i was running/they were running to me, ever since i have had everything maxed with 60fps.

Intel Core i7 2600k @ 5.1ghz - Noctua NH-D14
4GB RipJaw 2133 7-8-7-16
Dual Radeon HD 5970 O.C Core: 850 Mem: 1200
120GB Corsair Force SSD R: 260MB/s | W: 270MB/s
Corsair Professional 1200W

Before i would run into Gridania or some camp with a hand full of people and i would have to come to a complete stop to let it catch up, i noticed early on that my HDD indicator was lit up contantly, my frames rates seemed to increase but a tad, when i say a tad, i mean the old HDD (7200rpm platter) made my frame rates dip from 60 solid to 30-45 for several seconds or until i stood still, it would continue to fall behind until it evetually stuttered, this was maxed out as well, now i can't even tell if someone is coming towards me and it's a nice change.

1920x1080
8xQ MSAA
General Draw Quality: 10 (Highest)
Background Drawing Quality: 5 (High)
Shadow Detail: Highest
Ambient Occlusion: On
Depth of Field: On
Texture Quality: High
Texture Filtering: highest

[Chumeia]

Keep in mind that if you don't have a 64 bit system you cannot run with Virtual memory off and that will be needed. You might want to use a tweak program to send virtual memory to another quick disk based HDD. SDD are great for read back but not so great for writing.

[tizubythefizo]

I'm considering picking up another 590 GTX to run in quad sli, and maybe a 120GB ssd to install the game to. If I can't hit 60 FPS with that set up, then it's definitely a broken game (considering that's the most powerful possible graphics card set up there is...for the next few months anyways >.>)

[tizubythefizo]

Keep in mind that if you don't have a 64 bit system you cannot run with Virtual memory off and that will be needed. You might want to use a tweak program to send virtual memory to another quick disk based HDD. SDD are great for read back but not so great for writing.

Even with a 64 bit system you should NOT turn virtual ram off. Windows still pages memory, and turning vram or paging off could cause lots of bad things to happen or not work properly. Windows should only make use of Vram once memory use is high anyways. It'll then check to see what hasn't been used in a while, or what is inactive, and page it to the HDD. enough ram and it won't need to go through this process, but if you turn Vram or paging off, then that one time it would need to do that it won't be able to and BAM memory error

http://www.sevenforums.com/performan...managment.html

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/25...virtual-memory


Also had a big discussion in my college OS class a few months ago about the same issue. There is no performance gain (even if you think there is, there's not. it just does not work that way) for turning of virtual memory,and doing so CAN cause errors. So it's a no gain but possible loss scenario.

Especially with win7, the WMM is very good at what it does.

[Diraco]

Just got a new 2500k system with C300 SSD and win7-32 to replace my e8400 with 15krpm hdd for playing newer games. Keeping the same old video card, a GTS250, I get a steady 60fps almost everywhere with no stuttering at all. Occasional slowdown to 30fps happens due to a GPU bottleneck (99% usage reading with GPU-Z), even with all graphics settings at their minimum and 1024x768 resolution. It seems that cpu usage never gets above 48% or so, with 1 thread occasionally hitting 22% usage.

Since I use the machine only for playing games, I only have 4gb of RAM installed, with paging turned off. I've trimmed windows down to the bare minimum, so it is only using about 350M of memory. I've only tested with XIV, but so far no crashes or odd behavior due to no paging file. All the games I play are 32bit, so I'm using 7-32, and XIV doesnt seem to be "large address aware". The XIV benchmark scores about 2% higher with the 32 bit edition compared to 7-64, so I'm sticking with it for now

As far as paging and SSDs go, it seems that most new SSDs have very fast write speeds, so it's not a performance problem to place the pagefile on them. It will cause them to wear out faster, however. If you can stand troubleshooting occasional strange things happening, you can run with paging off. If you only run 1 program at a time with no virus scanner or any other background programs, you probably won't have any problems. I think turning off the pagefile also disables suspend-to-RAM sleeping.

[tizubythefizo]

@Diraco

Read this...

http://lifehacker.com/5426041/unders...dnt-disable-it

Nothing good can come from keeping paging off. People that say it's good have no idea what they're talking about. DO NOT LISTEN TO THEM.

The page file is only used when A) it needs to be (some apps and sometimes windows itself demands it. Windows will just turn on PF when it needs it and won't tell you). B)You've got a program minimized for a long period of time. It's not active, and doesn't need to hold up space in RAM.

You've got 4 GB, that's not enough to try to run without PF. You will eventually end up with some funky errors/weird behavior (that chances are you won't even attribute to the missing PF).

It's bad mojo, baaaad mojo. A system crash due to lack of memory is a baaaaaaad thing. no bueno. But don't take my word for it, read the article.

*EDIT*

Also read...

http://serverfault.com/questions/236...ne/23684#23684

and the links he posts to get a better understanding of virtual memory and how windows handles it.

Fact: If you don't fully understand how PF is used by windows, how memory allocation works, how paging works

DON'T MESS WITH IT.

Would you just start pulling wires on a car without knowing exactly what will happen/what could happen?

[Diraco]

@Diraco

If you are only running XIV (which isn't large-address aware), and a minimal set of services, 4gb is plenty. I have yet to see XIV use much over 1.2GB, even. Most people want to run more than one thing at a time these days, though, along with a virus scanner, and they don't mess with any background stuff.
So, it's true: the paging file shouldn't be disabled on a machine with a workload that isn't carefully controlled. Best to just leave it on!

[pp321]

@tizubythefizo

Do you have a FFXIV profile in your "Nvidia Control Panel" under "3D settings"? There's a setting called "Antialiasing Transparency" in there. As per Nvidia's recommendation, changing this setting to "Multisample" offers superior performance. Well, from what I've experienced, I can tell you it DOES NOT offer "superior performance". In fact, it caused my game to stutter like mad.

So I went back into my settings and changed it back to "OFF" and clicked APPLY. Loaded the game again and STILL terrible stuttering. WTF. Turns out the setting didn't save. Yes, it says "OFF", but the fact is it's still on "Multisample"... just not visually. And so this time I clicked "restore" to restore the FFXIV profile back to default settings, and the stuttering went away. Now I know you're thinking it must have corrected some of my OTHER settings back to default, and so that's why there's no stuttering now. Well, that wasn't the case because I already had all my settings set to default long before the restore. And just to prove my theory, I regenerated the problem 5 times so it's definitely that buggy multisample option at least for me.

In other words, if you've messed w/ that option in the past, try to do a restore, and see if that works for you.

HTH... cheers.

[Replicant]

For those of you still using a HDD like me and have some stutter, everytime you restart your computer run a windows 7 defrag on your drive before you log into the game, i've tried other defrags to see not the same results but they may vary. I know its irritating to run a defrag once or more a day for those of us who like to turn our systems off sometimes but it does seem to completely remove all stutter from the game for me and another system i built. SSD ftw guys ~ get one, i need to; ;