Any plans on optimization?

[Ava]

I would say thats because of your CPU, even though its at 3.2GHz an i7 has features that help to improve performance, like turbo boost (if its needed) and hyperthreading, which your CPU doesnt.

The Q9550 is more powerful than the low end of i7s, the only CPUs worth upgrading to would be a hi end i7 or i5 and I can't justify upgrading my mobo + cpu with the current games on the market. If this game requires a high end i7 just to be able to play smoothly on Standard settings, then that's a serious design flaw. I know people with significantly worse computers than mine claiming to run on higher settings just fine. This would indicate a serious optimization issue.

Your choppiness is due to the weak HD5850. It just can't handle this many polygons in crowded areas. With my HD5870 I get 60 fps most of the time. If I play fullscreen and use Crossfire I always get 60 fps.
You can set everything to highest except general drawing (8) and AO. There isn't much difference since the polygon count is the same.

Perhaps you can shed some light on this then. I have a friend who plays using a Geforce 460. According to the benchmarks (i'll let you Google them, they are everywhere) a 5850 performs higher than a 470 (one model above the 460). This friend has his settings all set higher than mine and claims to not have any sort of choppiness at all with a standard HD and a comparable CPU (IIRC he's using a low end i5). How could this discrepancy be explained?

[Delsus]

The Q9550 is more powerful than the low end of i7s, the only CPUs worth upgrading to would be a hi end i7 or i5 and I can't justify upgrading my mobo + cpu with the current games on the market. If this game requires a high end i7 just to be able to play smoothly on Standard settings, then that's a serious design flaw. I know people with significantly worse computers than mine claiming to run on higher settings just fine. This would indicate a serious optimization issue.




Perhaps you can shed some light on this then. I have a friend who plays using a Geforce 460. According to the benchmarks (i'll let you Google them, they are everywhere) a 5850 performs higher than a 470 (one model above the 460). This friend has his settings all set higher than mine and claims to not have any sort of choppiness at all with a standard HD and a comparable CPU (IIRC he's using a low end i5). How could this discrepancy be explained?

Yors may be more powerful than low end i7s but i7s are have alot more featured to use all cores more effectively than yours, also the have 2 threads per core which allows them to multitask or run applications that support hyperthreading more efficiantly than the Q9550.

The high send i7s are the extreme seires which have 6 cores at 3.4 or 3.6 so they are hugely more powerful, but even with a low to mid range i7 you should see some performance increase.

Also a low end i5 is not comparable to your cpu because the i5 is dual core (admitedly with 4 threads) and yours is quad core, while I say 2 threads per core makes it more efficient, it does still have the physical limits of a dual core for i5 and quad core for an i7

[Coldfire]

Perhaps you can shed some light on this then. I have a friend who plays using a Geforce 460. According to the benchmarks (i'll let you Google them, they are everywhere) a 5850 performs higher than a 470 (one model above the 460). This friend has his settings all set higher than mine and claims to not have any sort of choppiness at all with a standard HD and a comparable CPU (IIRC he's using a low end i5). How could this discrepancy be explained?

Benchmarks don't tell anything about actual performance in a game. Some benchmarks use lots of post processing, others use lots of data bandwidth and others focus on polygons. Another thing is the optimization(some games favor nvidia, some favor ATI).

[Ava]

Yors may be more powerful than low end i7s but i7s are have alot more featured to use all cores more effectively than yours, also the have 2 threads per core which allows them to multitask or run applications that support hyperthreading more efficiantly than the Q9550.

The high send i7s are the extreme seires which have 6 cores at 3.4 or 3.6 so they are hugely more powerful, but even with a low to mid range i7 you should see some performance increase.

Also a low end i5 is not comparable to your cpu because the i5 is dual core (admitedly with 4 threads) and yours is quad core, while I say 2 threads per core makes it more efficient, it does still have the physical limits of a dual core for i5 and quad core for an i7

You're wrong about i5s, they are quad-core. They started as dual-core but just like i7s they have evolved. i5s are considered some of the best gaming CPUs on the market right now. Top end i5s are competitive with top end i7s for gaming. (Sources: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...or,2989-5.html and http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html)

And I still don't think it's a CPU issue. But if it is, then SE needs to seriously reconsider their plans for FFXIV on the PC because that's terrible. Most people have worse CPUs than I do.

Benchmarks don't tell anything about actual performance in a game. Some benchmarks use lots of post processing, others use lots of data bandwidth and others focus on polygons. Another thing is the optimization(some games favor nvidia, some favor ATI).

I realize generic benchmarks aren't a good measure of performance in any game, but even in the FFXIV Benchmark software released @ beta I had a really decent score on high settings. Yeah, that software kind of sucked but you'd expect the actual game to at least perform slightly better, unless of course it's poorly optimized. I'm not trying to defend my hardware, but rather agree with the OP that this game is poorly optimized. A game nowadays should not require top of the line PC hardware to run. I've heard plenty of testimonials on forums of people claiming that mid-end PCs actually run FFXIV better than high-end PCs because of how poorly optimized the game is.

I play a lot of games, and you're not going to convince me that none of them use high poly counts like FFXIV. I have never to this date had any problem running any game on max settings, outside of FFXIV, whether that game be Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Rift, Dragon Age, Starcraft 2, Crysis, etc.

[Louisville15]

The Q9550 is more powerful than the low end of i7s, the only CPUs worth upgrading to would be a hi end i7 or i5 and I can't justify upgrading my mobo + cpu with the current games on the market. If this game requires a high end i7 just to be able to play smoothly on Standard settings, then that's a serious design flaw. I know people with significantly worse computers than mine claiming to run on higher settings just fine. This would indicate a serious optimization issue.




Perhaps you can shed some light on this then. I have a friend who plays using a Geforce 460. According to the benchmarks (i'll let you Google them, they are everywhere) a 5850 performs higher than a 470 (one model above the 460). This friend has his settings all set higher than mine and claims to not have any sort of choppiness at all with a standard HD and a comparable CPU (IIRC he's using a low end i5). How could this discrepancy be explained?

A 5850 better than a 470? lmao. No.

I think you're looking at old benchmarks (before the 470 drivers matured, resulting in a 20%+ performance increase).

The 470 trades blows with the 5870, often coming out on top.

EDIT: Also, there is no way that other guy is maintaining 60+ fps with a single 5870, unless he is playing at a tiny resolution or something.

[Ava]

A 5850 better than a 470? lmao. No.

I think you're looking at old benchmarks (before the 470 drivers matured, resulting in a 20%+ performance increase).

The 470 trades blows with the 5870, often coming out on top.

EDIT: Also, there is no way that other guy is maintaining 60+ fps with a single 5870, unless he is playing at a tiny resolution or something.

Yeah, upon second glance, you're right. But even still, my point still stands. (I'm trying to support your statement dammit. )

[Louisville15]

I would say thats because of your CPU, even though its at 3.2GHz an i7 has features that help to improve performance, like turbo boost (if its needed) and hyperthreading, which your CPU doesnt.

Few games make use of hyperthreading (and I doubt FFXIV does -- I could be wrong though) and in the cases that the games do not, most actually suffer a slight performance hit if HT is enabled. Again, this is usually very small, but it certainly doesn't help in the games that do not support it.

[Louisville15]

Yeah, upon second glance, you're right. But even still, my point still stands. (I'm trying to support your statement dammit. )

I'm just calling it like I see it, lol.

And the only difference between the i5 and i7 is hyperthreading. That's it. In 99% of cases (i.e. not editing or encoding) a i5 is more than enough power to get through modern games. Again, I seriously doubt this game utilizes HT, as the majority of the games do not.

That's not directed at you, but at that other guy. lol

[Crica]

I too custom made a beast PC for this game right before it went live.

I too use SDD.

When I turn on the option for Depth of Field, the game is very choppy.

When I turn this option off, I have no more choppiness.

[Rimmer]

Running the game currently on 1680x1050 Resolution fullscreen, 6x QSAA, Standard on textures, low/disabled shadows, standard draw distance setting, max texture filters/ whatever the other option was, i still get alot of choppiness through the game sometimes, but its mostly in main cities which are expected to be a bit more demanding, although with the amount of money i spent building my rig i was expecting to get alot more performance on XIV, but obviously i was wrong. The Black Shroud seems to be the worst actual zone regarding frame rates for me no matter what my settings are.
This is my build:

i7 960 @ 3.2Ghz (Stock)
Rampage 3 Extreme mobo
12GB DDR3 1600MHZ Corsair Vengeance RAM
128 Cruicial Real SSD
MSI Nvidia GTX580

Although i seem to recall a pretty detailed thread back on FFXIV some months ago regarding FFXIV requiring alot more CPU processing power rather than using the GPU more but im not totally sure., i certainly think it needs some more optimizations.

I too custom made a beast PC for this game right before it went live.

I too use SDD.

When I turn on the option for Depth of Field, the game is very choppy.

When I turn this option off, I have no more choppiness.

I have the same results with depth on field, it just doesnt like my setup.