Amazing system, FFXIV taking FPS hit. Why?

[Archadius]

General Draw Quality to 8, Ambient Occlusion off, other settings on/max is about the best you can do. You will not get 60FPS on that system; its just not going to happen with a mobility. You should hover between 35-40 in a city I am guessing, and 45-50 outside of a city with the specs that you are listing.

Seriously? That's just a shame. Would my FPS improve drastically if I reduced the resolution to 1920x1080 or whatever (currently 2560x1440)? Although, running consistently at 40-45 FPS might be a grossly noticeable difference for me, since even on my old system I was running close to max settings and averaged around 20 FPS (and it wasn't that bad).

Thanks!

[origamikitsune]

Lowering the resolution to 1080p will probably help. The game is more or less designed for that resolution anyhow. However, I doubt you will see much more improvement; you certainly aren't going to see 60fps on a mobility.

[Archadius]

Lowering the resolution to 1080p will probably help. The game is more or less designed for that resolution anyhow. However, I doubt you will see much more improvement; you certainly aren't going to see 60fps on a mobility.

Hmmm... I see. So it looks like I'll need to play around with a few options to find the optimum.

- 2560x1440 w/ max settings (except General Drawing 8 and Ambient Occlusion off)
- 1920x1080 w/ max settings (except General Drawing 9 and Ambient Occlusion off)
- 1920x1080 w/ max settings (except General Drawing 8 and Ambient Occlusion off)

Depending on the FPS difference to graphic aesthetics ratio, I'll make a judgement call. Also going to install drivers just to give my GPU some moral support lol

I'll report back with my findings when I get the chance!

Thank you to all who assisted me

[Khalus]

Just keep general drawing at 8 with whatever other settings you choose. 9 & 10 really don't make that much of difference and damn near cut your FPS in 1/2 for each number above 8. Just turn your AA up to compensate, it'll look smooth and you'll get a great FPS overall.

[Archadius]

Just keep general drawing at 8 with whatever other settings you choose. 9 & 10 really don't make that much of difference and damn near cut your FPS in 1/2 for each number above 8. Just turn your AA up to compensate, it'll look smooth and you'll get a great FPS overall.

Since AA caps @8x in the FFXIV config, I'm assuming I'll need to modify it to 16x via ATI CCC then?

[Khalus]

Must be an ATI thing, cause my FFXIV config w/ nVidia goes all the way up to 16xQ CSAA:

Here are the options I have:

• 2x MSAA
• 4x MSAA
• 8x CSAA
• 8xQ MSAA
• 16x CSAA
• 16xQ CSAA

Actually I had no idea what each option does over the other {besides making it smoother and less jaggedy} so I looked it up...here is what I found:

You have 8xCSAA, 8xQ, 16xCSAA and 16xQ. 8xCSAA is basically 4xMSAA+ 4 "possible" coverage samples. This means that the lowest quality in a scene could be a minimum of 4xAA, and the highest quality could be 8xAA (This varies depending on the number of coverage samples within the scene). 8xQ is basically 8xMSAA. 16xCSAA follows the same principle as 8xCSAA except that it uses 8 coverage samples meaning the highest quality could be as high as 16xAA. 16xQ isnt 16xMSAA but rather a more higher level of 16xCSAA, with a minimum of 8 multi samples (so 8xAA is the minimum in any given scene) and 8 coverage samples.

[Archadius]

Must be an ATI thing, cause my FFXIV config w/ nVidia goes all the way up to 16xQ CSAA:

Here are the options I have:

• 2x MSAA
• 4x MSAA
• 8x CSAA
• 8xQ MSAA
• 16x CSAA
• 16xQ CSAA

Actually I had no idea what each option does over the other {besides making it smoother and less jaggedy} so I looked it up...here is what I found:

I'm thinking it may have something to do with not having drivers installed. I'll look into it.

That blurb is confusing lol, essentially I think if I can find something that provides 16x, to go with that haha.

Thanks!

[Coldfire]

There is no CSAA for AMD cards. They use EDAA(up to 24 samples), MLAA instead of Coverage Samling Antialiasing. MLAA works well with FFXIV BUT it WILL break other applications that use D3D.

[Archadius]

There is no CSAA for AMD cards. They use EDAA(up to 24 samples), MLAA instead of Coverage Samling Antialiasing. MLAA works well with FFXIV BUT it WILL break other applications that use D3D.

FFXIV is the main game I play on my Windows partition, but could you list a couple examples of what might use D3D? (Games or otherwise).

Define "break" lol, are we talking "you'll need to disable/reduce the MLAA via ATI CCC for these apps to work properly" or "said app/game won't even run, and could potentially cause harm to your system"?

[Coldfire]

JDownloader and Dosbox(fullscreen mode) for example are programs that didn't work anymore for me. Best case: visual glitches, worst case: system crash.