CPU Bottleneck

[Capita]

The game uses more than 2 cores. It's capable of utilizing all cores of an i7 or better (4 physical, 4 hyperthreaded). Anyone who tells you otherwise has no idea wtf they're talking about.

Take a GTX 460 or any mid-high end card and try running FFXIV with a mid-high end dual core CPU and I guarantee you'll hit a bottleneck with the game using up 90%+ of your CPU while only using 40-60% of your GPU (up to 70% GPU usage on higher end dual cores, which is still a bottleneck). You can somewhat alleviate this by raising your graphics settings to put more load onto the GPU and taking some of the workload off your CPU, but it's not a great "fix". It's just masking the problem.

Now put the same GTX 460 or any mid-high end card and run FFXIV with a mid-high end quad or more CPU and you'll notice CPU usage down to 40-60% distributed evenly through all cores while GPU usage sits at around 90%+. This is what you ideally want, as there is no CPU bottleneck and the game is pushing your GPU to its capacity, meaning your GPU is actually doing its job.

So, no, FFXIV isn't limited to 2 cores. Alpha and Beta were limited to 2 cores, but not the version we play now.

And to the poster before me, you're living in the past. GPU's handle multi-processing like that these days with SLI (offloading tasks such as PhysX, Ambient Occlusion, etc. to one GPU while the other focuses on rendering). Even setups with single GPU's barely offload any rendering to the processor anymore. That only occurs when you're running low res and not utilizing the full capabilities of your GPU, which is what happens when you have a CPU bottleneck. That's why you see people with CPU bottlenecks actually get lower performance when they lower their graphics settings instead of raising them (less GPU usage equals more CPU usage).

@OP: I notice you're using a single core CPU. I'm surprised you're able to run this game at all. You definitely want to look into some upgrades. If you don't want to spend much, you can get an AMD X4 Socket 965 with motherboard for under $200 and then just upgrade the RAM accordingly. Though I think it might be time for you to build a brand new rig altogether using the latest tech if you're gonna be upgrading almost every part of your rig anyway.

[Zenaku]

...why would it only utilize 2 cores?

Because SE said back in E3 that this is a 32Bit game using no more then 2cores but i guess they change that sometime around release.

[Coldfire]

Seriously... did you even read my post or did you just want to write something? xD
We were talking about CPU multicore usage. I said I used special tools to check the real usage.
Do you even know how HT works? It's not like eight cores... it's eight half cores.
Do you know how SLI and Crossfire work? They cause extra core usage since the rendering thread is cloned.
But that's not FFXIV. That's the GPU driver.

[Capita]

Did you even read what I wrote? Your "tools" mean crap when actual physical testing on both dual and quad cores proves that the game uses more than 2 cores. CPUz and a host of other CPU monitoring software agree with me, yet somehow your one "tool" disagrees? Yeah sure. You're more than welcome to stick to a dual core, but I'll laugh if you try to use anything higher than a GTX 460 in it. Hell, my E8600 was struggling with a single GTX 460, while my Q6600 runs the game flawlessly with dual GTX 460's, and my i7 920 doesn't even begin to choke.

I'm also well aware that hyperthreaded cores aren't physical cores, which is why I mentioned "physical" and "hyperthreaded" separately.

Battlefield 2 and Bad Company 2 also have the same problem as FFXIV. Both games use four or more cores, so using a dual core on either of them with any decent GPU severely bottlenecks the system at the CPU. Both bottlenecking problems are completely fixed with the use of quad cores, which is further proof that both games use more than two cores (BC2 was a paltry 30-50 FPS with an E8600 while a Q6600 using the same video card ran it at 80-120 FPS on max settings). It's not a coincidence that both games run ridiculously better on four cores than two. Benchmarking performance doesn't lie, otherwise people wouldn't bother with them. If you still try to tell me the game doesn't use more than 2 cores, you're severely stubborn, misinformed, and stuck in 2006.