Stuttering especially while in town.

[Franzisca]

The game, in its currently state of development, suffers off poor programming/optimization. The only thing you really can do at the moment is to encourage it with stronger hardware. While being heavily GPU bound it is also heavily CPU limited, believe it or not, my i7-2500k bottlenecked my GTX580 in this game up until i overclocked the CPU to 4.5Ghz, especially in citys. Right now i can maintain a steady 60 FPS in citys, outdoor, near camps, no matter how many active PC/NPC are around, its running perfect.

My detailed system specs as reference:

Intel i7-2600k at 4,5Ghz
Nvidia GTX580 at stock
DDR3-1600 (8GB)
Samsung MLC-64GB SSD
(a dedicated SSD drive for the installation does real wonders for the load stuttering in citys)
Windows 7 x64 HP

Game settings:

Display Mode: Full Screen
Windows Size: 1920x1200
Multisampling: 4xMSAA
General Drawing Quality: 8 (Standard)
Background Drawing Quality: 5 (High)
Shadow Detail: Highest

Texture Detail: High
Texture Filtering: Highest

Ambient Occlusion is still a no-go (I wonder why, its not that demanding in other games).

Within the Nvidia control panel it is recommended to force vsync and activate triple buffering for ffxivgame.exe. Helps big time with the extreme tearing the game also suffers and improves performance a little bit in fullscreen mode.

Obviously, the hardware requirements are in no relation to what you actually get to see on the screen in terms of graphics, Square Enix needs to work on the engine, it doesn't help at all if the game is limited to PC enthusiasts who got 3k€ machines, they really need to make it run better on mainstream PC's. Releasing a next generation game that is expected to run for 5-10 years, may it be multi-platform or not, with not even DX10/11 support and native x64 binaries is a shame also.

With best regards

[Maximus]

I've been having this problem like a lot of people, and again mainly in the towns. Even when there is no one about. But I'm sure this was not happening to me from the beginning (starting from Phase 2 beta). Then November onwards the stutting started to happen. I've lowed the specs, but it does not always solve the problem. My PC specs are in my signature atm.

[Ilethius]

Regarding the HDD caching, I wonder if using one of those fancy new Solid-state Drives would help? They're supposed be ridiculously fast.

Pretty expensive too and I have only seen ones for 150GB, the file transfer speed is very quick but maybe not quick enough to justify the price. (for me anyway)

[GSDragoon]

Is everyone with this issue running Windows 7? I had been running Vista for couple years and it was going great. A couple months ago I had upgraded to Windows 7. When running under Windows 7, I had noticed this issue. I also had noticed it when running The Last Remnant with Windows 7 Release Canidate and Server 2008 R2. I currently have Vista and 7 installed (both 64-bit). I can bounce between the two, using the same settings and Windows 7 will have HD thrashing when the game first loads up. Once things start getting cached it's fine. I've tried using the same chipset and AHCI drivers in Vista and 7, but 7 continues to have problems while Vista is fine. No other game or program seems to have a problem. They test about the same using HD Tune. I think there's an issue with FFXIV and Windows 7. I've tried a bunch of different options and drivers and nothing is fixing the issue.

[Maximus]

First off: After the recent Earthquakes, and the servers being shutdown I know that this post is a little of time, so I post this ready and so I do not forget to post it. My hats of to our Japanese friends and wish them all the best.

Since my last post I had started experimenting with the setting to try and reduce the stuttering problem, and have resolved it some what. The solution is going to be different for everyone though. I made some changes in the Catalyst Control Center under 3D application settings, as well as up my ffxiv settings back up. Here is just an example of my settings

CCC 3D Settings

Use application settings - Boxes ticked
Texture Filtering Quality - Quality
Enable Surface Format Optimization - Already ticked
Mipmap Detail Level - Quality
Wait for vertical refresh - Performace (always off)
Anti-Aliasing Mode - Performace (Multi-sample AA)
Triple buffering - box not ticked

FFXI General Settings

Display Mode - Full Screen (my native is 1680x1050)
Multisampling - 4x MSAA
GDQ - 8 (Standard)
BDQ - 3 (standard)
Shadow Detail - Standard
Texture Quality - High
Texture Filtering - Highest

Framerate never drops below 30 and sets at 40 fps in towns, a little less in the crowds but it seems to compensate for that somehow and runs smooth. I'm also using Gamebooster v2.2 to shutdown unnessary background apps.

[luis72gonz]

I am just testing a reply and this message has no relavance to the topic.

[Kohta]

I spent $140 in a 60GB SSD and i no longer have that jumpy-ness when in town or coming to an aetheryite(sp?), i noticed the problem when i began to stutter and jump real bad and my HDD light was lit up solid, couple seconds later it was fine, but it became unplayable arrive to the adventurer's guild. Originally i didn't think it would make a differance so i bought a drive big enough to fit in my PS3 comfortably incase it had no effect, but it did, so i will have to look into more of a 128GB for FFXIV's future expansions to fit.

AMD Phenom II X6 1090 @ 4.2ghz
8GBs RipJaw 1333 @ 6-6-6-15
Radeon HD 5970 O/C 850/1200
Noctua NH-D14
Corsair F60 60GB SSD

[snibe]

I tried the settings above and the only thing that made it bearable was to turn off any anti aliasing. It's still stuttering in the cities but not as bad, doesn't seem to be caching the hard drive as much.

[origamikitsune]

Apparently, FFXIV uses a lot of caching (to the point where some people will crash as they reach the 32bit memory limit on the cache file size) and so the stuttering is most notable 1.) when you first log in and it has to write everything to the cache file, and 2.) when you are in town presumably because there is more data there to cache; outside of town where the landscape is copy-paste a little more it isn't noticeable. The easiest fix (in theory) is to get a hard drive that isn't going to cause a choking point for the system. I run a beast of a haitachi drive, and I notice the problem for about 10-15 seconds when I first log in, but nothing beyond that. I have heard that some people who have switched to solid state drives do not have this issue at all.

[snibe]

yup I thought about a bigger hard drive, but with a baby on the way I can't really justify it for a game I play maybe once a week. we already invested 1700 in a new laptop for my wife to play (which is never does now) and 400 for some cpu and motherboard upgrades for me to help with the issue. Sadly it only helped a little due to my older sata hard drive.