FPS has dropped to half and don't know why....PLEASE HELP!!

[RaineMagus]

is it possible some software is bottlenecking the GPU and causing me to NOT get my full 2gb as I was when I first installed the video card??

Programs running on the machine in the background indeed can use up video-memory, however the impact of anything other than a game is usually pretty trivial.

[Tools such as Sysinternals "Process Explorer" can display per process GPU usage and video memory usage]
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/s.../bb896653.aspx

-View > Select Columns
-Process GPU
-Check "GPU Dedicated Bytes" and "GPU Usage"

NOTE: dwm.exe is probably your biggest memory consumer other than the game. dwm is the Windows Desktop Window Manager / an OS component.


--1.5GB of video memory (aka, Geforce 580) is good enough for FFXIV:ARR in even 2560x1600 / 1600p, in all areas of the game. The highest that I've ever seen the game use is 1.2GB of vram with NVidia's drivers, so I think you're safe here unless you're trying to run multiple games at the same time or ludicrously high resolutions (such as a span across multiple 30" monitors).

I'd concern yourself more towards the speed of your bus or something power management related. If you want to check your used video memory though (for the sake of curiosity), GPU-Z can display this under the 'Sensors' tab ("Memory Used").

** Please note that alt-tabbing out of the game in "fullscreen mode" will cause incorrect results here [by forcing D3D device loss and resource unloading]. **


As long as your used memory is under the 2048MB limit of your Radeon, you're fine. A few hundred MB being used by desktop composition in Windows (before entering the game) is also perfectly normal. Unless video memory is saturated, there's almost no negative performance impact of using more.

ok I tried both CPUZ and GPUZ but I'm not technical enough to understand what I'm looking at.

-In GPU-Z, look under the "Graphics Card" tab (the default on opening the application).
-A bit less than half way down the page, next to ROPs/TMUs, there's a section that reads "Bus Interface" on the right side of the dialog.
-Click on the "?" icon next to Bus Interface, a second panel will pop open (docked to the right of the initial).. Click "Start Render Test" in this new dialog.
-An OpenGL rendering 'test' will start, causing high load on your videocard. The displayed bus interface "should" increase.

For example, my system reads here "PCI-E 3.0 x16 @ x16 3.0"

**As you have an older chipset, your system will likely display "PCI-E 2.0 x16 @ x16 2.0" or "PCI-E 2.0 x16 @ x8 2.0". If it's either of these, your bus is of suitable speed that it'd probably not cause you performance issues ingame.

If on the otherhand it reads.

"PCI-E 2.0 x16 @ x2 1.1", "PCI-E 2.0 x16 @ x2 2.0", "PCI-E 2.0 x16 @ x3 2.0", "PCI-E 2.0 x16 @ x4 2.0", etc.

>> Eg, anything under x8 2.0 and you have a MAJOR problem / your card would be severely bus choked in certain areas of the game.



EDIT: To be more specific rather than just telling you to look for the above numbers. With the age of your machine, its chipset should be PCI-E 2.0 capable. The 1.1, 2.0, 3.0, is the version of the PCI-E spec used. The x" number following is the number of lanes used.. The more lanes used, the greater the bandwidth available (more wires for the bus connection).

x8 is pretty much 1/2 the speed of x16, x4 a half the speed of x8, and so on. Internally in wiring, alot of motherboards divide up the physical slots into 'pairs', where use of an adjacent slot will cause sharing lanes between the two. Anyway, you should never get less than PCI-E "x8" for a videocard unless it's plugged into the wrong slot "or" your chipset drivers aren't functioning properly.

The top-most slots on your motherboard (physically towards the topmost of the case and closest to the CPU) are usually your fastest slots intended for videocards. Sometimes motherboards will have x4 slots that accept full cards, yet these are almost always the lower slots.


The performance difference between x8 and x16 in FFXIV is minimal, however by x4 and under, you'll hurt quite a bit.. (*Especially in the waking sands and the first boss in WP*)

scruffyotter

ok i can see what my mobo is:
Alienware model
chipset: Intel
Intel i5 750 @ 2.67 ghz
W7 service pack 1
6gb RAm
ATI 7870 2Gb

does this help to narrow down the problem??

You have an Intel Chipset board. That means the driver installer that I linked earlier in this thread is appropriate for your machine. Have you used that installer and the "-overall" cmdline argument?

the only thing that increased my benchmark score a bit was uninstalling and reinstalling the video driver. (which came out to 5200 something), but I want my 8301 score back!!

When you uninstalled and reinstalled the drivers, are you sure that the version reinstalled was the exact same version that was removed?

are there any other methods to try and figure out what's causing this??

I can think of a few more things to try, but honestly a fresh Windows install should be running fantastic with that hardware, and with just the latest drivers installed. (no need for tinkering)


I'd still suspect the cause isn't something that's been done to the machine / put on it, yet rather that something is 'missing' that was installed before. With most machines that I look at for friends with similar complaints, the usual cause is missing / improper chipset drivers (hence why I'm pushing this so much).