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

[Okiura]

This game is really badly optimized no matter how you look at it
My laptop has;

2xSSD setup Raid-0,
1.7ghz Core i7,
2xHD4870's 1gb,
6gb 1600MHz DDR3 RAM.

Up until FFXIV i've never had any "trouble" playing any games on maxed settings, games like Witcher2, GTXIV, DAO, DA2 and many more.

i don't exactly have issues running FFXIV but if you compare performace with those listeded above it's way below par. my only real issue is the 1-3ms feeze i get every few seconds, not a major issue but it is a issue.

So i did a few test's to try and narrow down the issues to see if there was a way to tweak somethings my end to improve performance. so first thing i did is found a nice quite spot in the world no mobs, no players just a few rocks and trees. I did this to reduce as much as possible any lag that is related to the server lag issues (same one that makes managing you retainer very painful). to try and keep the tests constant i set everything to standard and 2xMSAA.

what i found is may laptop can run 2 instances of FFXIV on 1 card (both windowed so no Xfire) as well as it does 1 instance on both cards, both tests were averaging the same FPS (30-40). next i reduced the clock speed of both the core and memory of my GPUs it wasn't until and hit the lowest possible clock speeds did i get any drop in FPS.
what this tells me is that although my GPU load at a constant 90-95%, clock speed doesn't seem to be a big factor, at the reduced clock speed i would have expected the GPU load and FPS to reduce significantly. this is very strange so whats with the high load?

next test ultra low settings, everything cranked down to the lowest settings. same tests as above with the same results only difference being the GPU load was 70% ish. so for some reason this game has a high graphics load even in the lowest possible settings this isn't normal behavior for any game. ^^

i have seen many people say they have very few problems graphics wise and it also appears most of those ppl are using Nvidia "hmm now which GPU in in the ps3? that right a Nvidia one" i would love to run similar tests on a Nvidia setup but sadly my Nvidia box is 8k miles away form me.

During the tests above i also restricted my my CPU to 4 cores and 1.2ghz and there was no significant performance reduction at the test location, the same restriction in town however was painfully slow which as expected mean the delay in town is to do more with CPU/HDD/Server speed and not graphics performance.

this game is in dire need of graphical optimization, at least for the ATI users out there.