High end system, still lowish FPS

[tizubythefizo]

So, my system specs are;

*Intel I7 980X 6 core @ 3.33 ghz (i prefer not to overclock,longer lifetime and less heat)
idles @ 4 cores 23-28 2 cores 35-40 degrees celsius (pretty sure it's a design flaw causing the 2 cores to run hotter)

*24 gigs of DDr3 RAM @ 1066 (max the 980 will support without OC,since I don't OC faster ram would have been a waste--I am also a programming student, I chew RAM like pringles)

*NVIDIA 590 GTX (also not OC, I could, but meh)
Driver v275.27(Beta)

With my options at
res- 1920 x 1080
No AA
General Drawing Quality: 10(Highest)
Background drawing quality: 5(Highest)
Shadow Detail: High
AO: off
DoF: off
Enable Hardware Cursor: on
Texture Quality: High
Texture Filtering: Highest


My system should (in theory) run FFXIV with everything on, max, and maintain 60FPS, however with even the options as they are, I'm getting 55-60 FPS outside (yay outside) but am stuck at 35-45 in town (more players/npcs = lower end).

Am I missing something here? I should blow this out of the water with my rig. Hell, I can play the witcher 2 with ubersampling ON and pull 35 fps.

For some people 35+ is fine and "smooth" for them, for me anything less than 50 is unplayable (that's why I have such a high end rig, it messes with my eyes as I can notice the slowdown). I also have a lot of stuttering in town, any time a new NPC or character renders, FPS drops to 5-15 for a second or so. (monitored w/ FRAPS)

I can verify that both GPU cores ARE working, @ 96-99%. It also doesn't matter whether I play in windowed or FS(I prefer FS, but for some unknown reason they still haven't fixed the alt tab crash)

My question is, is there some mystery setting I should have flicked on or off somewhere that's causing this slowdown? Do I have to edit a .ini somewhere?Is it just extremely poor coding? I'm completely baffled. I thought my CPU might be bottlenecking, but when I turned off AA, I gained 10-15 FPS. 6 cores @ 3.3 should (again, in theory) be enough to handle this game as well.

Any suggestions?Thoughts?Comments?

Thanks much.

[XiaoMaomi]

In my experience putting General Drawing Quality to 10 is more taxing than turning AO on. That is your problem.

I get 60FPS 98% the time with a 6970(@950), i7-930(@4.0) and only 6GB(1600) of ram.
Settings are as follows:
1920x1080
16xQ CSAA
GDQ: 8
BDQ: 5
Shadow: Highest
AO: Off
DoF: Off
Texture Quality: High
Texture Filtering: Highest

[tizubythefizo]

@Xiao

You'd still think the GTX590 (2 slightly underclocked 580's) would be enough to power GDQ on it's highest though

I'm actually considering throwing down another 700 bucks in 2 months to pop in another 590 for quad sli. Any games have slowdown with that and I'd have to slap a dev,lol

I'll turn it down and see what I get, but I still don't think that should be that much of a FPS killer

update to follow
**Update**

Turned GDQ down to 8, and tested with 16xQ CSAA and no AA

Framerate still would not go above 45ish FPS in town. With no AA it dipped down in the 30's a little less, but not enough to be significant. Don't think GDQ is the issue

**Further update**
I temporarily OC'd by increasing CPU ratio to 30, voltage to 1.35 which brought me up to 4008.85 mHz
ran FFXIV (after a 10 minute prime95 run for a quick stability check) and there was little, if any increase. Still hovered around the 40 FPS range. CPU apparently isn't the bottleneck, as there should have been some kind of increase but there wasn't.

This is really frustrating, I literally can't find any reason not to be having a solid 60 fps.

[Kassad]

I believe this is the same issue as described in this thread: http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...hlight=stutter

If so please take the time to fill out the SE form just like in the last post I did. The more information they will get the better, and the most chances we will get a follow-up. Thank you!

[Anty]

i think this is just one of the many issues that they put into consideration...

[tizubythefizo]

@Kassad

I read through that post, as well as your nvidia post. I don't think it's HDD caching (I didn't notice any significant increase compared to rendering npcs and enemies outside town when compared to npcs and pcs in town)

I'm inclined to go with what the nvidia forum post suggestions that it's just horribly unoptimized code. I do agree that should be a top issue to resolve. The game needs to be largely playable before it can go any further. The "we're not charging you for now" shows some level of commitment, but a public acknowledgment of the issue, as well as some type of ETA or priority level of fixing it would say even more from SE.

My guess is they'll probably end up letting FFXIV die out. The rep of the game is pretty bad, and has been for > 6 months. If they could at least get the graphics and FPS issues worked out, there might be a chance, but as mentioned in some of the posts I read it turns a lot of people off (I won't play it as is, I know I'm not alone).

[Loth]

So, my system specs are;

*Intel I7 980X 6 core @ 3.33 ghz (i prefer not to overclock,longer lifetime and less heat)
idles @ 4 cores 23-28 2 cores 35-40 degrees celsius (pretty sure it's a design flaw causing the 2 cores to run hotter)

*24 gigs of DDr3 RAM @ 1066 (max the 980 will support without OC,since I don't OC faster ram would have been a waste--I am also a programming student, I chew RAM like pringles)

*NVIDIA 590 GTX (also not OC, I could, but meh)
Driver v275.27(Beta)

With my options at
res- 1920 x 1080
No AA
General Drawing Quality: 10(Highest)
Background drawing quality: 5(Highest)
Shadow Detail: High
AO: off
DoF: off
Enable Hardware Cursor: on
Texture Quality: High
Texture Filtering: Highest


My system should (in theory) run FFXIV with everything on, max, and maintain 60FPS, however with even the options as they are, I'm getting 55-60 FPS outside (yay outside) but am stuck at 35-45 in town (more players/npcs = lower end).

Agreed, you should run it maxed out with that rig, the FPS you get are equal to mine, and I run an i7 920 with a GTX 570.

My settings are as following:
Res 1920 x 1080
AA 8xQ MSAA
General Drawing Quality: 8 (Standard)
Background drawing quality: 5 (Highest)
Shadow Detail: Highest
AO: off
DoF: on
Enable Hardware Cursor: on
Texture Quality: High
Texture Filtering: Highest

Am I missing something here? I should blow this out of the water with my rig. Hell, I can play the witcher 2 with ubersampling ON and pull 35 fps.

You actually are running with supersampling, the game builds the frames in a buffer, and the size of this buffer is set by General Draw Quality.
A GDQ of 8 is equal to your resolution, a GDQ of 9 is x1.5 of your resolution, and GDQ of 10 is x2 your resolution.

For some people 35+ is fine and "smooth" for them, for me anything less than 50 is unplayable (that's why I have such a high end rig, it messes with my eyes as I can notice the slowdown). I also have a lot of stuttering in town, any time a new NPC or character renders, FPS drops to 5-15 for a second or so. (monitored w/ FRAPS)

As Kassad linked you, this is due to HDD loading.
I used to run on a raid 0 setup with 2 Raptor HDDs, and I too suffered from some slight stuttering when first entering town or any area with a lot of people.
Resently I changed those for an SSD and have no longer any stuttering.

I can verify that both GPU cores ARE working, @ 96-99%. It also doesn't matter whether I play in windowed or FS(I prefer FS, but for some unknown reason they still haven't fixed the alt tab crash)

My question is, is there some mystery setting I should have flicked on or off somewhere that's causing this slowdown? Do I have to edit a .ini somewhere?Is it just extremely poor coding? I'm completely baffled. I thought my CPU might be bottlenecking, but when I turned off AA, I gained 10-15 FPS. 6 cores @ 3.3 should (again, in theory) be enough to handle this game as well.

Any suggestions?Thoughts?Comments?

Thanks much.

The game is not well optimized, and neither is NVIDIAs drivers for SLI (for FFXIV) (I ran sli until recently changing to the GTX 570) and doing an update of the SLI profile using this method made a big difference.
I think changing the SLI profile is what will make you run the game satisfactory.

[tizubythefizo]

@loth

Thanks, I'll try out the new sli profile and see what I get.

How bad's the coding if it writes to the disk so often that it causes the game to pause that badly. write to a buffer? anyone at SE? buffers? yes?

On reading in, they should keep that filestream that contain the data for rendering pc's open for a bit rather than closing the filestream each time it's done rendering a pc.

I'm suspecting that it's set to open and close with each new PC character that pops onscreen, multiple onscreen takes so much longer this way because I'm guessing they implemented it in a way that it has to load in each character sequentially (that is for each character open filestream,get data,close filestream,move to next) rather than open file stream load data...hey more people coming by load data..hmm 30 seconds and no new characters onscreen, close filestream.

That's my take as a programmer on what could be causing that. No way to know unless I decompile their .exe which is above my paygrade.


***UPDATE**
Tried the sli import, no change to FPS at all (also played around with AA and noticed no change at 8xQ to no AA) I did notice that after applying the fix, my 2 cores are only running around 40% instead of 100.

I think this game is just not going to have FPS above the 40 range in town.

[Haris]

The game just isn't good when it comes to technical stuff like this. I have a powerful rig that can run Crysis and Crysis 2 no problem fully maxed out, but I have issues with FFXIV and I don't know about you guys but this game just isn't as "pretty" as Crysis and it sure isn't superior in graphics. So what is the deal with the sluggish FPS and also the screen shaking I mentioned in another thread? Does SE even care?

[ScoutX]

Because someone mentioned i should post here too.
Regarding to my thread http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...nes-from-1.17c and this one http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...hlight=stutter

Well, i could tell a little story about stuttering. I started this game on day one with an old rig (AMD X2 2,6 GHz, an ATI 3870, 4 Gb Ram , XP Pro and normal HDD). Gameplay wasnt that horrible as i had suspected but loading times around aetherytes were bad. Moving 360° made this game stutter etc pp. My Auzentech Prelude wasnt working well. I lost sound often. I played many newer titles on low specs. Never had any problems with the latest drivers.
I'm a programmer too and loosing sound told me, that the ram speed and chipset isnt fast enough or maybe more. Latency too high. I began to create my gamerig.
Basis was a Nehalem I7 3 GHz on W7 Ult. 64 bit. 12 gig Ram, old ATI for a while.
While the sound issues were gone, the game itself goes more stuttering than ever before.
Because the menue and textbox cluttered my 19" monitor, i took my last money for a 24" monitor and an overclocked GTX 470.
Disappointment. Although low on graphics settings stuttering were not gone, frames bad, loading of NPCs slow. I overclocked the CPU to 3,5 GHz. As i has expected the minimum frames were better. I would say much better.
The Cure: Crucial Real SSD 300. One of the best consumer SSDs and no Sandforce Chipset. NPCs and characters and all other textures were and are very fast on my screen.
Currently i am one of a few players, who has an edge. If my parties have a "lag" because Bw is crowded, they say the server is bad. There is a drop in network activity for sure, but the main lag are the HDDs and rendering all characters around them. If i get teleported im instant in the new area and can run; other characters are often well behind me.

All in all the game has alot of problems as 32 bit client. 2Gb of Ram isnt enough. Too much HDD reloading. The game utilize only one main core. So the most expensive CPU doesnt work well, if its at stock speed.
BUT: The most important and i think the culprit of my latest stuttering. The game doesnt use Tesselation textures, which are rather small, instead uses a bunch of heavy weight textures, which are not cached in any form. Direct X11 was promised and we didnt get it. My actual graphics settings are very high with only AO and AA off. And im relative sure, that my Vram is not enough anymore.
My stuttering issues at local leves delivery at wasted camps are a problem of the animation. I think SE changed something here. Because we have an animation now. There is a blend in effect of 15 frames total black. After this 250 ms, the entire screen has to be redrawn from scratch. All textures reloaded etc. pp. I know that the 470 has a bad memory behaviour. I will test it today and post the results in my thread.

This game needs a ramdisk, even if a ramdisk is heavyweight on CPU. The other option , the gamefiles must be decompressed on HDD, even if it takes us 50 Gb on Filespace. The eternal loading of compressed files to get one texture out of it, kills HDDs very well and is a maior draback on gameperformance.

Edit: The stuttering was indeed a bufferoverflow of the vram. Cards under 3Gb Vram have alot of problems on higher resosutions wit hthis game.

But indeed, i have written much to improve gameplay, but you have the 60 fps limitation netherless. To get even this 60 FPs set the general graphics quality to 9 otherwise no actual graphicscard can handle the game at those FPS ranges. I don't want to talk about Sli or Crossfire. It could help but multicard installations have their own problems.