ATI Card compatibility issues!

[Brytor]

I am finding FFXIV has the most issues out of any game I play with interacting with Video drivers. Even more so then other SE games. Things seem to break from patch to patch with no changes on my side. Personally I think the blame falls on a mix of the Video card manufactures and SE. IF it was 100% ATI then a patch would not break as many things as I've seen break (Crossfire, etc.) I think a lot of the issues are due to the fact this is a DX9 game. I hope that the DX11 update with 3.0 addresses some of them. Sadly it appears this game runs better on older video hardware.

[Athenial]

Yeah I am also hoping that the dx11 will play a lot nicer with my computer...but that is quite a few months away to deal with the constant ctds

[Barristan]

Sadly, I had to downgrade my drivers (7870XT) to 13.12. It seems to play the nicest with this game. Still get some micro-stutters and hitches, but it runs fairly smoothly. Tried every driver from 13.XX to the 14.12 Omega Drivers and none of them were worth a damn, except 13.12. So, if you have older hardware, try those, they seem to be the most reliable.

[Hission]

For the ones saying "hey, its not the game, is your card", please, you are not helping. Also, i have the same problem, with a R9 280x. This problem occur only in this game, i play all my other games without problems, and this one, and since patch 2.3 to be precise, is the only one who crash. This is not the first post about this problem, and im sure this is not gonna be the last one.

[Athenial]

Especially with the increase in usefulness of hunts it is becoming an even larger problem. I want to say that this should be addressed, but no response from anyone on the SE side is quite telling. I can barely get in and out of rev toll without issues now

[Drako]

Memory-Leak-Preformance-Issue This isn't the first time this problem showed itself. The last time was, can you guess it? Was the last time hunts was popular. Back when they gave us hunts and the ability to get sands/oils from them. Read that thread, its exactly the same issue. Check the dates when the thread started to die down. That was conveniently around the time they nerfed hunts. Or rather when they pushed myth out the door, and gave us poetics, and made it where no one wanted to do hunts. The issue nearly all but disappeared. Now hunts are back in a big way, and so is this issue. My Fiancee uses a AMD 6970 and has this problem as well. The work around in that thread does help some but the issue will still happen. I have a R9 290x and haven't experienced a crash. But sense 2.5 my GFX lag has went to about 30 FPS for the most part. I use to be 60+ even sitting in Mor Dhona.

Also idk why that thread is under resolved. If they put it in their because someone found a work around by disabling a option in FFXIV, then that was not the right thing to do. SE should work with ATI and get this issue fixed already. How long do we need to wait, until the DX11 client?

Well I forgot to mention this issue actually has changed sense that thread. It use to just freeze up for the most part, and rarely crashed. Usually what would happen is it would really freeze up bad for awhile, then when it finally got back to normal textures were missing all over the place. Certain npcs would be missing legs/arms, or entire mobs were invisible. But now it seems instead of the game simply recovering, and showing missing textures, it just crashes the game. Maybe someone at SE could use that knowledge to help them find out what the cause is.

Workaround: Enable LOD and LOD streaming. Issue goes away for the most part. If it doesnt, select standard laptop settings, and make sure those two LOD options are checked.

It's depressing when people that can run Elite dangerous, Crysis, Star Citizen, <insert any nextgen game> at 60FPS but can't seem to run this without disabling stuff.

[Raist]

How long do we need to wait, until the DX11 client?

More or less.... yes. Soooo many of this games performance/stability issues revolve around the shoddy DX9 implementation... and Microsoft's lack luster support for DX9 (and by extension the vendors as well with their drivers in the last several generations). It's nothing new... and it isn't isolated to just XIV either. There are many DX9 games that have issues with the newer generations of cards when they are running in the newer versions of Windows.

Have to remember that DX9 is now run through an emulation layer. It hasn't been natively supported by Windows since XP. That was the last version of Windows where DX9 was supported properly by Micro$oft. It wasn't long after Win7 came out that we started seeing issues with DX9 in the video card drivers as well. It is more or less because of the fundamental changes in how Windows handles graphics, and that has also extended into how the drivers are coded as well.

So, yes... the DX11 client should resolve a lot of problems for people with cards released to market after around 2009/2010. I just hope they do a better job with it's implementation than they did with the DX9 client.

[Athenial]

More or less.... yes. Soooo many of this games performance/stability issues revolve around the shoddy DX9 implementation... and Microsoft's lack luster support for DX9 (and by extension the vendors as well with their drivers in the last several generations). It's nothing new... and it isn't isolated to just XIV either. There are many DX9 games that have issues with the newer generations of cards when they are running in the newer versions of Windows.

Have to remember that DX9 is now run through an emulation layer. It hasn't been natively supported by Windows since XP. That was the last version of Windows where DX9 was supported properly by Micro$oft. It wasn't long after Win7 came out that we started seeing issues with DX9 in the video card drivers as well. It is more or less because of the fundamental changes in how Windows handles graphics, and that has also extended into how the drivers are coded as well.

So, yes... the DX11 client should resolve a lot of problems for people with cards released to market after around 2009/2010. I just hope they do a better job with it's implementation than they did with the DX9 client.

Good post, however I would really like SE to at least acknowledge this thread with a response. I know they have to read these threads, do they not care? If they said something maybe that can give AMD users a glimmer of hope. Right now the silence is pretty much telling us "f off we only like nvidia"

[Raist]

You don't hear much official response here because it was intended to be used as a user-to-user forum more than a direct line to the developers and such. It's detailed in the sticky welcoming you to this forum.

The vendors have more actively communicated with users though (both AMD and nVidia... unfortunately more so nVidia than AMD)...but that is over at their forums. Which is actually more appropriate, as it is an issue with their drivers not properly interfacing with all of DX9.

Both camps had pretty much written off DX9 about 18 months or so ago. A big chunk of both brands' lines got sloughed off into legacy status. Forget exactly when it was in the AMD line (late 2012 or early 2013 I think), but for nVidia it was around their 340.xx to 343.xx driver releases. There are notes in there where anything pre-400 series has been dropped. So users have to use the older drivers for the proper legacy support (ie: pre DX10/11). Ever since then, all the newer cards have been solely dependent on the DX libraries to properly thunk back to DX9--which is where the problems come from. There is so much deprecation in Micro$oft's latest platforms (not just DirectX, also .NET and such as well), that with each new release more crap gets broken. You sometimes have to go back and enable older .NET just to get a program's installer to run properly because only 4.x is installed by default.

Things like that are all because Microsoft is moving away from those older methods faster than the vendors and the users are able to adopt the new methods Microsoft is thrusting on them. Look how they had to extend the XP end of life...it is still in use in some business circles regardless of no more support for it because the tools they use won't run properly in the newer OS environments. So, we pretty much are going to have to wait for the DX11 client to see how they remedy the stability problems on new hardware and other misbehaving things like broken hardware cursor and such that have plagued the game since it went public.

[Athenial]

You don't hear much official response here because it was intended to be used as a user-to-user forum more than a direct line to the developers and such. It's detailed in the sticky welcoming you to this forum.

The vendors have more actively communicated with users though (both AMD and nVidia... unfortunately more so nVidia than AMD)...but that is over at their forums. Which is actually more appropriate, as it is an issue with their drivers not properly interfacing with all of DX9.

Both camps had pretty much written off DX9 about 18 months or so ago. A big chunk of both brands' lines got sloughed off into legacy status. Forget exactly when it was in the AMD line (late 2012 or early 2013 I think), but for nVidia it was around their 340.xx to 343.xx driver releases. There are notes in there where anything pre-400 series has been dropped. So users have to use the older drivers for the proper legacy support (ie: pre DX10/11). Ever since then, all the newer cards have been solely dependent on the DX libraries to properly thunk back to DX9--which is where the problems come from. There is so much deprecation in Micro$oft's latest platforms (not just DirectX, also .NET and such as well), that with each new release more crap gets broken. You sometimes have to go back and enable older .NET just to get a program's installer to run properly because only 4.x is installed by default.

Things like that are all because Microsoft is moving away from those older methods faster than the vendors and the users are able to adopt the new methods Microsoft is thrusting on them. Look how they had to extend the XP end of life...it is still in use in some business circles regardless of no more support for it because the tools they use won't run properly in the newer OS environments. So, we pretty much are going to have to wait for the DX11 client to see how they remedy the stability problems on new hardware and other misbehaving things like broken hardware cursor and such that have plagued the game since it went public.

Ahh thank you for that information...really stoked for 3.0 I cannot wait for that to ship