Any plans on optimization?

[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.