Choppy gameplay

[Firesoul]

Well, I don't know about the numbers you gave for SSD capacity, but I have win7 Pro on the SSD but all my programs(where given a choice) are on a HDD and I only have 43 GB of the 111 available left on the SSD.

Hopefully on reinstall of OS and FFXIV the numbers get smaller.

[Bahn]

Try putting ffxiv on your SSD. Quite honestly putting your OS on an SSD is pointless. You'll get better boot times, but how often do you reboot? Once it's loaded, that's it. The games are that which have the constant read and write. Choppyness most frequently comes from video cards, in cities, from loading every avatar's little model as you run through, while it's trying to load the city's architecture. Once you are stationary does the choppyness stop? If so, that's the hard drive. If not, it's the video card. The 5850 is an ok card, but probably won't get you much above medium to medium-high settings. If you try on high, you will lag to death. Try turning shadows down first to see if that solves the problem.

Patch Tuesday pretty much makes me reboot at least twice to three times a month. Also some people actually turn off their PCs at the end of the day. This is more of a personal preference thing so I don't think that's an valid argument against putting an OS on an SSD.

The choppiness the OP is talking about happens when character models/etc are loaded from the HDD for the first time. After the models are loaded in town, the gameplay becomes smooth again because the models seem to be cached somehow. We've had this discussion before, and I too can verify putting FFXIV on the SSD will solve a majority of the choppiness.

It's not his card, but rather just FFXIV (as usual) being poorly programmed to handle player model loading.

Edit: It's also not necessary to reinstall FFXIV. If you know how to use symbolic links, you can simply move the FFXIV installation to your SSD and make a symbolic link from the original location pointing to where FFXIV was copied to on the SSD. That is what I did, and it works fine with no problems!

[Jediman]

can u get us a screenshot of your "Choppy gameplay" graphic image?

[Jediman]

mod delete this post if you c it .....

[Firesoul]

Well I thought I would finally post back. I have completed my reinstall and all things good.

It seems the problem is much less noticeable now that FFXIV is on the SSD. It still fluctuates with char's on screen and all but mostly in the cities there is much less choppiness.

I don't know if the SSD was the trick or just old driver settings, old registry errors, etc.

It definitely runs better now however. Constant 60 outside of cities and usually never lower than 40 in cities. Most of the settings are also a bit higher than before too. Still can't see how my old 500 gb, 16 mb cache HDD was lagging so bad though.

Whatever, it works and I'm happy now.

[Eunys]

Well I thought I would finally post back. I have completed my reinstall and all things good.

It seems the problem is much less noticeable now that FFXIV is on the SSD. It still fluctuates with char's on screen and all but mostly in the cities there is much less choppiness.

I don't know if the SSD was the trick or just old driver settings, old registry errors, etc.

It definitely runs better now however. Constant 60 outside of cities and usually never lower than 40 in cities. Most of the settings are also a bit higher than before too. Still can't see how my old 500 gb, 16 mb cache HDD was lagging so bad though.

Whatever, it works and I'm happy now.

Mechanical HDD's are terrible at fast data retrieval is why, even the slowest SSD's will out perform the fastest HDD's. Add on top of this that the game is poorly designed from the start and it's just a world of hurt. Glad your getting better game play though, thanks for the update.

[nasomi]

My gameplay improved dramatically with my SSD. with a 40gb I have win7 x64, ffxiv, office 2010, and photoshop, all fully installed, and i have about 2gb free. Everything else goes to a secondary hdd. fresh install on regular sata drive didn't fix my problem, but my SSD did. It makes sense though, it needs to read a TON of files when it has to load every character model out there when you're in the city, a hdd's 8ms latency adds up, but the ssd doesn't have that.

[Zenaku]

Or wait for 2.0 if you really can't then i guess what the other say to do would work also.