Ever wonder why this game heats up GPU's so much?

[Betelgeuzah]

Sounds far-fetched but most likely has an effect on the performance.

If I remember correctly SC2's cutscenes had the same effect before its release so I think it's not as self-explanatory.

[Krin]

Don't be naive, where do you think the instructions come from to draw polygons ?

When you call a OpenGL or DirectX function to draw something, a machine code instruction is sent to the graphics driver. The driver sets the instruction onto the PCIe bus and then the graphics card does all the work. The time to tell the graphics card to draw something is non-existent.

CPU time is spent processing message from the server, sending messages back to the server, reading your input from your gamepad/keyboard/mouse, computing some non-exploitable elements, determining where you are and where everyone else is, and telling the graphics card what to draw. That last part is a very small amount of time in proportion to all the other things.

You're confusing "rendering" with "figuring out where stuff is". To a degree, I'd expect the "water under the city" issue to cause CPU temperature spikes, because it's still figuring out where the water is. We're not saying that it's not wasteful, but it's likely easier on the CPU to say water everywhere at sea level than to manually subtract out the calls to draw triangles from where there's land, because that's one of the primary functions of the graphics card to begin with. The water, especially since it's a texture and not really a dynamic mesh, is more responsible for how long you stare at the loading screen and a piece of the over all CPU usage profile than it is for your GPU running hot.

Games are just now beginning to off load this work into GPU's via nVidia's CUDA and the equivalent in AMD. They just haven't figured it out very well, because Graphics cards are built for Linear Algebra and matrix multiplications. Expressing some of the game's math in those terms is not trivial, by any means.

[Fixy]

Huh...? That's not true at all, it's very simple for the game to just not render surfaces that aren't visible.

Try keeping your camera aimed at the floor or at a wall in a laggy area, and I can guarantee it'll make your framerate go up. I do it all the time when I go AFK because it makes my GPU temperature drop a bit as well.

obviously, and not relevant at all.

[Konachibi]

I actually checked this out today to see if the water makes much of a difference on the frame-rate.

I went to the boat at Thanalan and tried looking straight at the water, what I noticed was the frame-rate sky-rocketed to a nice easy 60fps, lovely and smooth.

Then I spun the camera around to face away from the water and look up at the building, the moment the building came into view the frame-rate dropped down to 30-40 fps.

Then I looked back at the water and the frame-rate went back up, and slowly the boat started to move onto the camera from the right. The more of the boat came onto the screen, the lower the frame-rate went untill eventually it went down to the 30-40 fps I was getting from looking at the building.

I've also noticed the biggest spikes in frame-rate is caused from plants and bushes. So I don't think having water under the ground is actually the problem, I think it's how many polygons some parts of the enviroment are made from.

That's just what I think though.

[Rentahamster]

I've also noticed the biggest spikes in frame-rate is caused from plants and bushes.

Yeah, seems like the non-permanent objects take up a lot or resources. Was pretty noticeable during the Christmas event with all the trees.

[Konachibi]

Yeah, seems like the non-permanent objects take up a lot or resources. Was pretty noticeable during the Christmas event with all the trees.

Plants, bushes and trees do sway in the breeze though, and move quite a lot in the wind (If you watch carefully enough, sometimes it's barely noticable). They don't really look like a bendy texture either, they appear to be very finely crafted 3D models, so to make them bend around like that would take a heck of a lot of polygons to do.

Most games get around the problem by making multiple flat 2D textures (sprites) then meshing them together to give the appearance of a 3D object, that way making them bend in the breeze is just a case of bending a flat texture.

I can understand SE wanted the game to look amazing, and heck it does, the plants do look fantastic, but it seems to have come with a high price.

[VeranRamaden]

This is just typical of SE, FF11 still runs like crap on the best PC's out there.

The game seems to have a bottleneck where the CPU is concerned, going from a radeon 4800 to a 6800 should give a significant jump in fps but in reality it doesn't, something very odd is going on with this game engine, I just hope they are fixing it.



Don't be naive, where do you think the instructions come from to draw geometry ?

my netbook can run XI...

[SilvertearRen]

Wow. Square Enix. Can you suck any harder?

It's examples like these that makes me think that all Japanese game developers fresh out of university should be forced to do two years of game development at a Western game studio before returning to Japan.

[Darkshade]

I've actually never had this happen to me in XIV or XI, and I played XI on multiple systems, however mostly PC for years. I heard many stories of friends in XI with 32MB~64MB GPU and 256MB SD RAM having this problem all the time.

I'm sure someone will point out that I only have one Rank 50 and that I haven't played XIV enough or that I'm lucky but it just hasn't happened and I'm sure I've traversed most of the game by now and I've never seen an area "load in" under me.

For reference XIV is installed on a SATA 2 SSD and my hardware specifications are as follows; CPU: Phenom II 955 @ 4.12 GHz, 8GB DDR3, AMD HD 5850 1GB, Windows 7 Ultimate x64.

Maybe I'm just lucky or haven't played enough but I have a feeling XIV just isn't optimized (well it isn't really optimized for anything...) for some of the hardware configurations that some of you have.

Hopefully SE can work on core system fixes like Terrain Load In/Clipping/Boundary Detection, system side UI, Direct X 11 and other misc fixes in the future.

[Agoven]

I can't say that I have this issue at all. So I guess this doesn't apply to me.