HELP! Cannot run game in windowed mode (Fullscreen mode is 100% fine)

[origamikitsune]

Mostly it only interferes with the game for people who have the Optimus technology. But, it uses Direct X, which can cause interference with FF cause its programed poorly.

[Ventus]

I'm about ready to give up, tried everything that people have said in this thread and much more and it still has random times the "unable to detect directx device" error comes up. No game or laptop should ever put me through as much misery as this issue has.

Guess I'll just have to log out and look up everything instead of having the luxury of minimizing.

FML

[DAOWAce]

Guess I'll just have to log out and look up everything instead of having the luxury of minimizing.

Use Steam or Xfire (or even Raptr if it fixed its ingame overlay) to access web browsers while playing fullscreen; it's what I do because windowed mode runs like trash, even on my system.

[Chumeia]

I am a PC store manager and Technician in Madison, WI, USA.

I have an Intel i3-530 based PC with an ATI 4560 with 1GB DDR3 by Sapphire, with 4GB of RAM, 32bit Windows 7 Pro, running on a Gigabyte uATX mother board, and an used Seagate 80GB 7200rpm SATA.

I have adjusted many settings trying to squeak more power out of this build without changing any parts and found that despite my GPU running at 100% out on an open map, but runs about 45% in the city, and lag is also worst in the City.

Resolution from all other players is that the lag is caused by HDD access as each Character is individually loaded as a they come into your area. An independent programmer tells me that this is to reduce the risk of ranged hacking. It helps prevent a player from locating you from par away and messing with you. Anyway, the way to compensate is to install your game custom on a Stripe RAID enabled D-drive rather than the usual C-Drive location.

Tip: Do not Stripe Raid your C-Drive for performance unless you like reloading everything every time there is an issue.
Tip: Simply Clone your C-Drive after complete setup for a quick restore if you get a virus or some other corruption.

Advantage of a Stripe RAID D-Drive is that games can read and write very fast using both drives simultaneously, thus much of the lag goes away. Of course this does not compensate for Network lag.

Disadvantage Striped RAID cannot be cloned. If your striped raid gets a corrupted in anyway. Only solution is to erase and start over. Make data backups often or maintain a RAID5.

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Topic Author:

Your Laptop is not well suited for FFXIV. I would recommend selling it or taking it back to the store.

1) FFXIV is a 32bit game. Though they recommend an i7 and more than 4 GB of RAM, the game must run on WoW32 in order to load, and thus a 32 bit environment is emulated, slowing things slightly.

2) FFXIV has, to my the best of my experience, no APIs that take advantage of any kind of Multi processor technology. Thus it doesn't mater if you have a Core Duo or an i7 the bulk of your power comes from the first core. The rest is Windows trying to break up the work in the back ground. Don't get me wrong, having a multi core is far better than not, but its not the huge advantage that you might think, at least, not yet.

3) Intel Chipset not supporting of FFXIV. Just run the Demo program. It should reveal the issues.

4) Never mind the issues with your PC, even after replacing the computer you may still notice issues in certain modes. Thanks the archaic Direct X9 running under the hood. It has issues with many newer drivers designed for DX10 and DX11.

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My recommended minimum build.
-This recommendation Stands, both Laptop and PC. You want to game, don't fall below this line.

A) any Core2series, i3, i5, or i7 running no less than 2.6Ghz
B) 4GB DDR type memory, -should NOT perform any less than 800Mhz per chip
C) Memory MUST be configured in Matched pairs, or Triple if on i7. -Non matched will reduce performance too much.
D) Video card can be any PCI-E type with 1GB of RAM or better, but cannot score less than 500 on the PassMark Highend Video card results. http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/vi...Radeon+HD+4650

[Coldfire]

An independent programmer tells me that this is to reduce the risk of ranged hacking. It helps prevent a player from locating you from par away and messing with you.

I think the reason is just that the game is optimized for PS3 which doesn't have enough memory to preload character models. The client doesn't need to know the exact location of a character to preload. A "in range" message from the server would suffice for that. Another problem is the lack of async HDD access. Means the game basically stops if it has to load a character.

And about the slowdown of 32bit on 64bit is just not true. Because it's no emulation but a compatibility mode on the cpu and windows on windows 64 handles the system calls like a normal win32.

Edit:
And sadly since Intel's IGP causes so much problems I would recommend to either get a PC or a laptop with AMD CPU(or old generation Intel without IGP) for this game.