FFXIV Temps on GTX460

[Eunys]

I currently play Fallout III, Crysis 2, WoW and a few other games none go above 50-60c on a pair of Nvidia GTX460's at 1920x1080 max settings. I've noticed though FFXIV in the short time I played through the intro getting to the pub/inn that my cards reached 79c before I shut down the game. Is this normal for this game?

[Khalus]

XIV is not optimized very well, and yeah it does tend to draw more power than I think it should, making ones GPU heat up really quickly and remain quite hot. I have a GTX 580, and with the EVGA Precision I pump my fan speed up to 77-85% and the temps still remain in the 66-68c range, to as high as 76c.

At that same fan speed in most other games, my temps are quite cool between 45-56c...

[MattyWS]

check nothings running in the background

[Loth]

Yes, this is quite normal for FFXIV, it tends to make video cards run about 10° C higher than most other games.

Your video cards are rated to run up to 104° C, so do not worry about 79° C.

What graphics settings have you set in the Config application?

[Khalus]

What graphics settings have you set in the Config application?

Everything on max, though I keep Ambient Occlusion off, and I hold steady at a solid 60fps.

[Coldfire]

Yeah the GTX 580 is pretty powerful. But the fan/cooler is the weak point on most highend GPU. Watercooling is a nice way to solve this, but this is pretty expensive for GPU.

[origamikitsune]

I run a 460 as well. Had the same problem. I run everything at max with AO off. I was borderline uncomfortable with the temp. I lowered General Draw Quality from 10 to 8, I lost over 10degrees C, saw a HUGE performance increase, and noticed absolutely no decrease in draw quality.

The reason is this: General Draw Quality 8 = renders the full resolution. 9 renders 1.5 times your resolution and re-sizes the image. 10 renders 2x your resolution and re-sizes. The effect of this is essentially anti-aliasing through resizing, and nothing more (its a bit more complicated, but that's the general idea). If you have 16AA on (or even 32 if you do it through the nVidia control panel) I will be very, very, very, surprised if you noticed the quality difference between 10 and 8 general draw.

In short, Turn AO off, and crank every other setting except General Draw. Tweak in the nVidia Control Panel if you want to eek out every last drop of quality without loss of performance (only thing I have on is forced vsynch).

[Coldfire]

The heat goes down if you underclock the gpu memory. This shouldn't affect gameplay at all. The game is probably optimized to run on PS3 and does alot of unnecessary operations/transactions :P

[Khalus]

The vapor chamber cooling on the reference design 580 that I have is excellent, and vents 100% of the heat out the rear of the case. Its really just XIV not being fully optimized properly, cause my heat is quite low in everything else. And should anyone decide to get one, don't get their new HD & DS designs. Those only have a standard fan directly over the CPU, and about 70% of the heat is ejected back into the case. Even with a well vented case, you'll see temps rise a good 10-15c.