High end system, still lowish FPS

[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.

[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 >.>)