General Game Performance - Anyone Else Feel The Way I Do?

[Delsus]

Not always the case.... I've run the game on the same exact system... other than changing hard drives... and I can tell you... SSD isn't the miracle cure....

With something as multifaceted as an MMORPG... there are tons of places along the way that could serve as a bottleneck....

On a core 2 duo with an 8800gtx... You could have the fastest OCZ PCIe SLC SSD on the market and not run the game properly....
BUT...
If you had an I7 990x and a Radeon HD 6970 and a regular 7200rpm HDD... you'd run the game more than adequately on very high settings....

What does that tell us?
Storage medium is the least of your worries....
Even the networking adapter, ISP and bandwidth make more of a difference than HDD

How can you just diagnose that he needs an SSD without asking what type of Internet connection he is using...
Is it wireless?
Do you share internet with others?
Is someone that you share internet with downloading a lot?
Are YOU downloading a lot?
Is there ANYTHING on your computer, running in the background that may be connecting to the internet, or heavily taxing your hard drive?
What kind of hard drive do you have now?
Do you know the RPM and cache size of it?
Is it more than half full?

I can guarantee you, that:
1. A Western Digital caviar black SATAIII 7200RPM 64MB cache
2. A western Digital Velociraptor SATAIII 10000RPM 32MB cache
and 3. OCZ Vertex 3 SATAIII MLC

You wont notice a performance increase with any of these (Provided the HDD's aren't full)

Now if you have an old 5400rpm 8mb cache drive from 2002... or an eco friendly green drive (FV#K THE PLANET).... then go to an SSD... then yea.. it will look like the SSD works miracles... but going from that old drive to a modern high performance HDD will also solve the problem

Seriously... you can run the game with high end everything else, but a mid range HDD and get no problems at all.... no stuttering... no performance decrease...
and if you are using an old outdated HDD... you're better off getting a TB or higher Caviar Black drive and spending a lot less for a lot more HDD space

Its quite simple, he is talking about loading lag, which is the long times it takes to load things like initialy starting the game and character models, which are stored on the client's PC, when the game starts it has to load the huge zones from the HDD, and even the character models it just gets the information for the PC to build the models for example if there is a hyur midlander male with face 2, large body size, a scar on the left eye, brown hair 1 etc etc, this is what the client recives from the server, then the client builds all character models onscreen using that information.

Because of this loading from even a 7200RPM HDD takes time because of the physical limitations of a HDD which when the cost of SSDs come down HDD will be obsolete, yes the client could do with optimising which I will not deny, but loading lag is either HDD read speed, CPU clock speed because or graphics card rendering speed.

Most of what you mentioned are networking problems, but if you look at the network indicator ingame, you will notice not much bandwidth is used by the game, take a character model that usually only takes about 5Mb to download because its the client that draws them.

Btw, if a HDD is almost full the loading lag isnt affected that much, the main problem there could be from a full HDD is fragmented data, because the CPU knows where information related to programs should be even with a full HDD, the CPU knows where all FFXIV data should be when you open the patcher, because the programs are connected.

You are just somone that thinks they know everything, people have taken my advice on a SSD before now and have seen large loading lag reductions, believe me when I have the money I will be getting a SSD when I have the money, even if it is just a small one to put windows and FFXIV on, which is all you need.

My profession makes me need to know how to diagnose problems based on little information, and because the op posted about loading lag, and said they have a decent PC, it is the most logical fix to invest in a SSD because the game has to load so much information from the HDD on the fly, if the op has a SSD I would then suggest a CPU upgrade because of the need for multitasking to play this game.

Exactly my point.. High End CPU, Mid-high end GPU... good amount of RAM....
regular old HDD....
I'm telling you... the HDD is not the bottle neck for most systems like the industry would have you believe
And honestly.. if someone got an SSD... I'd say you'd benefit more putting just your OS on it and leaving everything else on an HDD

Also here you mention 6GB as a good amount of RAM which is true but unless you run graphics design software of virtual machines, or other RAM intensive software you dont need it, RAM only slows a system down if you are topping it out by running multiple programs at once for example I have 8GB of RAM in the laptop I play FFXIV on when the system is running just firefox skype and background programs I am using 1.62GB of it therefore I will not notice a slowdown just running FFXIV on top of those, however with 2GB of RAM I would notice a slowdown because the system would be page filing so my system does not crash.

The only way I top out my RAM is when I am running 5-6 virtual machines which I do.

If you want to see the problem page filing has, top out your RAM, and you will notice the symptoms of topped out RAM, 3GB+ RAM you will not notice a slowdown, and it will definatly not increase loading times, and if you have any less than 3GB RAM you should really upgrade.