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

[RaineMagus]

ok but how do you know it isn't?
(besides I don't want to reinstall anyways...)

EDIT: the reason I ask is : I was getting a score of 8301 when I first installed my 2gb video card, but now I'm getting around 5400 something.

so if it's the game that's lagging, why am I not getting my original high score on the benchmark??

This is very good judgement on your part. For your machine (not talking of the others that've posted) it can't be the recent patches, as these patches do not impact the old benchmark tool nor Metro.

so should I reinstalll W7 or not? I'm not sure what to do..

While true what you prior said (that it's probably something with your installation)... I personally wouldn't reinstall the OS just yet, and would continue looking for the cause. Reinstalling isn't guaranteed to make the game work better either and may just take up more of your time / leave you with the same results that you're getting right now.


Check power-management:

Unlikely to make as much an impact as you're seeing, yet the usual default power profile for any new install of Windows is "balanced". Try selecting the "high performance" plan.


You can change the active power plan from:
-start > control panel > power options

OR, if the above settings were 'locked' by the person who installed Windows.
-start > run > gpedit.msc, Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > System > Power Management > Select an active plan.


Check memory configuration:
-You mentioned not having all 6GB of your ram recognized on receiving the machine back. Additionally that someone touched your machine and did a "full rebuild". Make sure that your DIMMs are inserted in a proper configuration for Dual Channel operation, and verify the memory controller is indeed in Dual Channel mode (consult CPU-Z and the manual as mentioned before).

Single to Dual Channel mode can make a significant performance difference in games. Dual to Triple channel, not so much (already sufficient bandwidth).


Double check the version of your PCI-E controller drivers installed (make sure that the chipset installer updated correctly):

-Open the Windows Device manager.
Start > Control Panel > System > select "device manager" from the left tab.

-Scroll down and expand "System Devices".
-Look for *** PCI Express Root Port *** (*'s indicating wildcard / fill in the blank here)
-Right click on the above found item, select properties.
-Select the "Driver" tab.
-Look at the "Driver Date" and "Driver Version" field.

Is the driver date xx/xx/2006? If the drivers listed are 2006, then the Intel Chipset installer did not correctly update drivers.


When all else fails:

-Uninstall your current video drivers (using the control panel option, and then using device manager with the "remove driver" checkbox checked)
-Repeat until you only have a "Standard VGA" display adapter installed
-Reboot in safe mode.
-Clean old driver entries completely off the machine. (Eg, using DriverCleaner.NET, Driver Sweeper, etc etc, or one of the many available online "manual" deep cleaning guides)
-Reboot back to "normal" Windows (not safe mode)
-Reinstall latest display drivers.

-Recheck performance (of both FFXIV:ARR and Metro LL [your other installed game]).


If performance is still low, repeat the above and rollback to 'older' drivers. (perhaps the new drivers do not behave well with your hardware and the games you're playing)


Ask yourself: Is it possible that the drivers your prior Windows install had weren't updated? Newest does not always imply best, even if it often does.


Other thoughts:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2670838

Check if your machine has the latest DirectX platform update installed. If you had Internet Explorer 10 or later installed on the machine, then you'd have this by default.


Sometimes people using their own browsers, like Firefox, Chrome, and so on don't install IE10, and thus don't automatically get this update. This is known in rare cases to cause problems with AMD cards, or to fix problems with newer AMD drivers that addressed the issues that started after the platform update's release (eg, the fixes from AMD in their drivers caused new issues without the platform update installed).



EDIT: (more)

The technician who reinstalled Windows on the machine likely did NOT do an install using the default Windows disk (too time consuming to be worth their time), yet rather used a specially created install media or "cloned" an already configured image to the computer and then performed a peer2peer adjust [*cut the total install and update time down to 20 minutes or less*].

In any event ... it's hard to know how this image has been adjusted, such as if common drivers have been installed and updated on the base image multiple times, or if errors have been introduced from repeated slipstreaming of updates to keep their media 'up to date'. "fresh" in an install put on other than by yourself is, well, probably a different meaning of the word fresh.


--Fresh to a technician could be a base image that they've been modifying in a virtual machine for 'years'.

[scruffyotter]

Le sigh...I did everything you suggested and I'm still getting the same 5500 score.
at this poiint I don't know whether resintalling W7 is going to do anything.
-I did the power mgt
-I did the driver cleanr
-installed new driver
-did the chipset thing

and still...nothing.

ALSO: I was actually on the phone with the tech guy and I was installing it myself with my Windows disc. after a certain amount of time, he said he was going to have the next tech guy take over my pc remotely and would finish the installing.
I didn't watch what he was doing as I assumed he knew what he was doing.

it's def. a Windows/software problem. I had the same new vid drivers when I installed the new 2gb video card. and that was when I got the 8301 score.
there must be something missing...
I'm going to try rolling back the driver to previous version, but I can already tell it's not going to work...

oh and thanks SO MUCH for all your help!! I would not have known these tips and tricks if it weren't for you.

ALSO: if rollling back driver doesn't help, I was going to call Alienware tech support and tell them my situation...I don't know what they can do about it though.

if everything fails, would an OS reinstall help??

ALSO: I figured out my RAM problem and fixed it: it reads the full 6gb Dual channel now

thanks again!

[scruffyotter]

ok I tried EVERY suggestion you offered and NOTHING worked. very bummed and pissed.

I'm just going to call Alienware tech support tomorrow and bitch at them.

thanks though for all your help, it's greatly appreciated

[RaineMagus]

One thing that occurs to me that a remote tech might do when installing everything on a machine ... is adjusting video driver settings to his / her personal preferences (by habit), such as AF, AA, texture filtering quality, and so on. Like the tech might have cranked Anisotropic Filtering to 8x or 16x, as your card is capable of handling it in most games well.

While these settings should've been cleaned from a full driver uninstall and registry wipe (purge of the drivers)... If they weren't, then settings in Vision Engine would override some of the quality settings in the FFXIV benchmark. Which would of course yield what seems an artificially low score.

That all said, you've probably already checked this and my apologies if you have. Just trying to help brainstorm of what it could be. Texture filter overrides can also cause overlap flicker in games if the game only works with specific settings (expects the drivers set to "let the application decide"). Good example would be Alan Wake and playing with AF causing all plant sprites to have black backgrounds (not be transparent).

---As I don't own Metro LL, I can't comment on if this could be the cause of the shadow / texture flickering you saw.



Also of what you mentioned far as the techs helping with the Windows install. >>Remote Control<<


Do you remember what software they had you put on the machine?

If it wasn't just the built in remote desktop / RDP, it's possible that their remote control software installed something called a "video mirror driver" (such as the Mirage Driver). Usually those drivers aren't active other than when a remote control session is active, but IF the driver was constantly active, then it could badly hurt performance.

Video Mirror Drivers do what the name partially implies, they "mirror" rendering calls that are done to the screen ... yet don't actually 'draw' anything. Instead of drawing, the mirror driver just tracks which regions of the screen were updated. This permits for remote control software to know what regions of the screen have changed without polling (taking and comparing snapshots), which drastically cuts the CPU overhead. However, this concept isn't 'free' either ... it still has a cost.

The mirror driver is usually under the "Display Adapters" category in device manager.
If it's hidden, you can get it shown with something like the following from a command prompt..

set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1
start devmgmt.msc

-Then selecting View > Show Hidden Devices. The above env variable being set will extend the list of hidden devices shown (beyond what you'd normally see).


If you'd be willing to provide a list of installed software, I'd be happy to take a look through it and see if there's anything I recognize on there that might impact performance. I'm sure others would be glad to take a glance over the list too. It'd also be helpful in the chance that you DO reinstall Windows, and the game 'did' run fast afterwards. Since that list could be cross-checked against the fresh install to narrow down what exactly was done to the machine that hurt FFXIV.

To build such a list, you can use wmic (which is included with Windows). Like this from a command prompt:

Microsoft Windows [Version 6.3.9600]
(c) 2013 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

C:\Users\x>cd desktop
C:\Users\x\Desktop>wmic product get Name, Version > dump.txt

It'll produce a file that looks something like this:

Name Version
Ventrilo Client for Windows x64 3.0.8.0
Desktop Restore 1.6.3
Microsoft Office Visual Web Developer 2007 12.0.4518.1066
Microsoft Office Visual Web Developer MUI (English) 2007 12.0.6612.1000
Microsoft Office Shared Setup Metadata MUI (English) 2007 12.0.6612.1000
Microsoft Office Shared MUI (English) 2007 12.0.6612.1000
Microsoft Office File Validation Add-In 14.0.5130.5003
Microsoft Windows SDK for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Tools 6.1.5294.17011
Visual Studio Tools for the Office system 3.0 Runtime 9.0.30729
Visual Studio 2012 x64 Redistributables 14.0.0.1
Visual C++ 2008 x86 Runtime - (v9.0.30729.4148) 9.0.30729.4148
Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable - x64 9.0.30729.4148 9.0.30729.4148
... etc

-You could then open dump.txt, and copy/paste the contents into this thread.


Definitely give Alienware support a chance to look at the machine first before doing a reinstall solo. Nobody knows better than them what they put on there and changed (they probably have a list of what their techs usually touch).

[scruffyotter]

WOW!!!!
I think I just found out what's happening!!!

I originally used the benchmark that's called Character Creation which gave me the 8301 score.

after the pc crash I downloaded another benchmark that was called Exploration.

just out of curiousity I downloaded the character creation benchmark.
and I got my 8000 score back!!

I noticed something was different because the black mage at the end of each benchmark does something different in each one. I thought to myself "doesn't he do a different Limit Break I thought"......

so basically that's it:
Exploration benchmark gives me 5500
character creation benchmark gives me 8000

!!!!!!!!!!!!

what is the difference between the two? How do I know which one is the correct one with the right score?

this is SO weird......

EDIT: so I looked at the version numbers for each benchmark and the Exploration one is the most current.
Why would my original score of 8000 drop to 5500?

[RaineMagus]

what is the difference between the two? How do I know which one is the correct one with the right score?

Perhaps just the scoring metric / weight was changed (lowered) to more accurately reflect true ingame performance. Eg, taking into account FATE's and other high population areas of the game. I've not compared the two benchmarks in terms of min, avg, max FPS, so I can't comment on if there's actual engine differences between the two ... yet it wouldn't matter either way (see below):


They're both "technically correct" in that any benchmark software only tells you how THAT specific benchmark performs (far as its scoring). They're intended to give you a 'jist' of if your machine is capable of running the game playable, or at all, and if your machine's performance is up to par compared to other people who have similar setups (eg, whether or not something is wrong with your configuration)... That said, neither will give you a very accurate idea of how the game itself will run (in all ingame situations), as the game is constantly moving / not a fixed target ... with population density in zones changing, engine changes each patch, and so on.


To be honest, towns, outposts, FATE's, etc, can bring even the highest end machines to their knees (machines which score ludicrously high on the fixed benchmarks). The only point of the game where the benchmark performance may be close to a reliable metric of true-ingame performance is in instances, where there's consistent caps on the visible players and monsters on the screen at once.


Point being, I wouldn't concern yourself over the benchmark scores so long as the actual game runs up to your standards.


--Also, glad that you figured out the cause of the score differences and that it ended up being something alot simpler than all suggestions I had made. (sorry for sending you on a witch hunt)