The FPS and my Graphics Card

[RaineMagus]

also, to rainemagus, i tend to run ssao on any game just fine, transparent lighting too, as you mentioned the 760, i havent run into issues with ssao or any of those variants, not that i really understand them well.
would this be due to my motherboard having pci 3.0 slots or in combo with my cpu, or possibly because i force my games to use my gpu for physx rather than auto selecting or using my cpu?

SSAO is "screen-space" ambient occlusion. It's an attempt to approximate global illumination in the pixel shader, working on the depth buffer with some ray-tracing. Far as what it 'does', SSAO is supposed to darken areas that would receive less-light (such as corners of a room or cracks / fissures in a surface). It's intended to add to perceived realism by making these portions of the scene more pronounced.

Far as PCI-E 3.0.. No, that won't have any real impact here as SSAO is run entirely in shaders and doesn't take up bandwidth. PCI-E 3.0 helps more with loading times, load stuttering, and resource transfer in general. You mentioned emulators, which is something that PCI-E 3.0 can have a significant impact on due to that alot of consoles have direct hardware frame-buffer access (PS2 games notably do this alot).


If you open a tool such as GPU-Z, MSI Afterburner, or EVGA Precision X, you should be able to watch plots of GPU and or bus utilization in the game. Settings wise, of the graphics settings. Transparent lighting and SSAO are the two "biggest" settings in terms of GPU usage. (not including object occlusion, which I'm assuming that most people do not shut off ... as this is intended to be an optimization / not impact visual quality except for rare exceptions where an object is improperly culled)

Anyway, if you're not at 100% usage, then of course you have no reason at all to shut off settings. Use your card to its fullest by all means.


-I probably should've mentioned that I'm considering "highest" settings as including 16x Anisotropic Filtering being set in the drivers.

The effect of SSAO is very subtle when done properly (many games exaggerate it to the point it doesn't look realistic). That said, alot of people will say that they can't notice the effect at all .. similar to doing more lighting passes, which people also usually say they can't notice. If you don't see a difference, then you might shut those settings off to either run the card cooler (if FPS limiting is on) or in favor of different options such as cranking the AF.



EDIT: To answer the AMD question on processor equivalence.

The only thing that can match an i5 / i7 3570k, 4570k, 3770k, 4770k, etc, in FFXIV:ARR would be a heavily overclocked 8350 [*9590 would be another choice, rather than overclocking an 8350 by hand*]. This is not a comparison of total processor performance, only of single core performance (which is what matters for the game). Yet it should also be noted that you DO NOT need a top tier processor to achieve 60 fps where it matters, such as in dungeon instances and for raids. It becomes more important in town around the market board, or in FATEs.

Hyperthreading (3770k vs 3570k), you also will not see any difference in game performance with.... Unless you're encoding video / streaming. Of course if you're streaming all bets are off and an 8350 may compete well with an Intel too!