Insane and unique load times

[Zaranghae]

Hey all so I think I may have quite the unique problem and I'd be very appreciative if anyone can take a few minutes to help me out here.

I've been playing FFXIV for almost a year now and in the beginning I was able to load the game pretty quickly (maps, icons, npcs, skills) even in areas such as Mordhona within almost seconds. However, over the months as updates came along I've been facing longer and longer load times to the point where they would be ridiculous. As of today, I have to wait at least 5-6 minutes to load a map such as House or Ul'dah. The map type doesn't really matter since it seems they all take the same time to load. However, when I finally do load my map I still have insane latency to load certain things such as items, skills, animations, npcs, and other players. It usually takes a good 10-20 minutes just to load everything smoothly on the map. I thought it may have been my internet but I've been using university internet and I have no problems with chat latency or connecting to worlds. I think there may be 2 reasons as to why this is happening but I cannot find a remedy.

1. Often when I load FFXIV I alt+tab because I don't want to sit at the screen for 10 minutes and still have to wait for npcs/characters to load. I'm thinking this may trick my computer into saving resources and not prioritizing FFXIV as a program that needs to use a lot of graphic resources. There were times where if I just left it to load it would be faster. However, this only happened a few times and wasn't a reliable solution.

2. I have a 5400 1TB harddrive that is partitioned into 2 blocks of 500GB data, C: and D: For my C: I keep my office programs and other fun stuff so it has about 200 GB left. My D: is where I keep my games (FFXIV) and it's pretty much clean with about 400GB left. I'm not sure if having partitioned harddrives is the problem here maybe due to slow harddrive speed but I haven't changed this since the beginning where I could load the game within seconds.

I'm pretty certain that it's not an internet problem but rather certain resources like animations, npcs, and textures aren't being loaded fast enough. One random thing I've tried is going to my battery options and making sure harddrive never turns off. I'm not sure if this does anything but I'm willing to try anything at this point.

[Raist]

hmm.... something may be going on with your hardware. Having the system and data drives split might lead to some issues, depends on how physically scattered the sectors are on the drive I suppose. A 5400 RPM drive may be more affected by high fragmentation if it is missing the expected 1/3 stroke when seeking to the new sectors I guess. Have you defragmented the drives lately?

Otherwise, something else could be consuming resources in the background and it is bogging the loading of textures and character data. I've noticed on my laptop when I swap out to desktop and back there is a bit of lag fully loading things back into view (lighting is the last thing that finally pops back in a few seconds late). This goes a way when I run in borderless mode though---but then VSYNCH is ignored and I have weird display issues. Mileage may vary, but you could try running in borderless mode to see if it behaves better with the alt-tabbing part of it. But I'd try going through some basic maintenance items first to see if it helps out--clear temp files, run malware scans, do a good defrag and such to see if the system in general perks up a bit.

Oh yeah.. and if your system has both on-board and dedicated graphics available, make sure it is running on the dedicated graphics. Things may have gotten out of sorts because of a driver update or something (ie: Windows Update). So, it may be worth reviewing the video card setup to make sure it is still set for optimal performance there. Note you may have separate profiles for battery and AC power modes if it is a laptop too, just in case that may becoming into play somehow.

[Zaranghae]

I've never defragmented before but I don't see how that would help since the game is on a separate partition? I will definitely try this though.

Well I usually never turn off the laptop, just have chrome open with some word docs and FFXIV. I only close the lid and put it to sleep when I'm done for the day. I have pretty good specs and I've never changed the settings since I first started playing the game so I don't think it's the settings in-game. I use full screen. The laptop is sort of old actually, it went through some rough damage and I had to replace parts over the years. I basically use an i7 3rd gen with a GTX670M. It's not the best but I've been getting by with 40-50 FPS on high graphics. Either way I haven't done any part replacement or any changes to the settings/laptopsettings before I even started playing FFXIV. It just seemed that with every update, the load times would take longer and longer. I'm thinking it may be that I moved to a different world as well -> Famfrit -> Leviathan. But I don't think it's a lag problem

[Raist]

I've never defragmented before but I don't see how that would help since the game is on a separate partition? I will definitely try this though.

Well I usually never turn off the laptop, just have chrome open with some word docs and FFXIV. I only close the lid and put it to sleep when I'm done for the day. I have pretty good specs and I've never changed the settings since I first started playing the game so I don't think it's the settings in-game. I use full screen. The laptop is sort of old actually, it went through some rough damage and I had to replace parts over the years. I basically use an i7 3rd gen with a GTX670M. It's not the best but I've been getting by with 40-50 FPS on high graphics. Either way I haven't done any part replacement or any changes to the settings/laptopsettings before I even started playing FFXIV. It just seemed that with every update, the load times would take longer and longer. I'm thinking it may be that I moved to a different world as well -> Famfrit -> Leviathan. But I don't think it's a lag problem

OMG... Power that poor thing down once in a while. Windows is notorious for this. NTFS as well. Server versions are more tolerable of it, but desktops definately need a solid reboot periodically.

[Eye_Gore]

Have you checked your processes running? Maybe something is running in the background. See what your CPU usage is.