Ever wonder why this game heats up GPU's so much?

[Reaujien]

knowing is half the battle

GI JOOOOOOOOOOOOOOE! *CHIME*

[Mushy]

I am glad Lyern was here, as I have not worked with opengl or directx or mapping tools since 2004

I was just trying to say there are so many variables, and we know almost nothing about crystal tools, or the hacks implemented to get it to run an mmo's seamless world(WITH CROSS PLATFORM SERVERS NO LESS). its all speculation.

Cool observation, but I will leave it to the professionals who have been knee deep in the engine and its tools for the last 6 or 7 years??

[BONKERS]

my overclocked GPU doesn't really get all that hot honestly.
With a bit of smart fan-profiling/overclocking/system airflow you can get good temps while playing this game.
My GPU never rises above 70C while playing. Most of the time never even reaching passed 67c

[goonMagi]

Bumping this thread.

the usage of your CPU from this game is -insane- and far beyond the level of the graphics themselves.

PLEASE FIX!!!!

edit; I just want to point out to people "without problems" or those who immediately jump at other's computer setup: even people with the best computers and up to date hardware have graphical problems with this game and see their computers get overworked. Just because you don't see or understand the problem, does not mean it doesn't exit.

[Krin]

PS: There, I was just trying to be informative and exhaustive. And yeah, I'm still pissed, and I feel trolled. Hopefully this was helpful to someone though. And at least it was enough to procrastinate until play time and patch notes, hell yeah

No, this whole thread is a troll by someone who knows nothing about graphics programming. I do a lot of C and OpenGL programming and I agree with you. You're graphics card does some extremely simple and straightforward math to determine what polygons need to be drawn and what polygons do not need to be drawn. This is such a fractional portion of the full work required to draw a single frame you literally would have to load all three zones of Eorza, and all character models into the GC to do what you're claiming. It's ridiculously easy for a graphics card to take your camera position, fulcrum, side-culling instructions and tear through billions of 3D* vertices in a time measured in hundreds of nanoseconds marking them as "draw/no-draw". The hard work is figuring out what pixel on your screen is what color when you consider light sources, textures, multisampling, anti-aliasing, etc. That's what takes several milliseconds and produces the heat that you attribute to the "water".

All the work subsecting and determine whether to draw an object before making calls into DirectX/OpenGL is a relic from the days of AGP and conserving bus bandwidth. PCIe and current front-side bus speeds make this a non-issue.
* Actually, the space described inside your graphics card is a 4D normalized space. That means the origin, (0,0,0) is, in fact (0,0,0,1). This is because graphics support translation, such as moving everything 10 positive unites along the X axis. Since this sort of transformation results in (0,0,0)X != (0,0,0) where X is a 3x3 transformation matrix, it breaks the rules of linear algebra and linear transformations of vector spaces. Hence, we describe the entire 3D space as existing at 1 on the 4D access. Translations in 4D result in (0,0,0,0)X = (0,0,0,0), so it all works out. You're Graphics card actually considers a small sliver of the 4 dimension (at least, mathematically) when it draws FF for you. Er go, your graphics card is a time machine. (*trounces off having had his fun messing with the trolls*)

[Krin]

Bumping this thread.

the usage of your CPU from this game is -insane- and far beyond the level of the graphics themselves.

PLEASE FIX!!!!

edit; I just want to point out to people "without problems" or those who immediately jump at other's computer setup: even people with the best computers and up to date hardware have graphical problems with this game and see their computers get overworked. Just because you don't see or understand the problem, does not mean it doesn't exit.

Graphics usage is the topic of this thread, sweetie.

CPU usage is an entirely OTHER beast, very specific to the MMORPG genre. MMORPG's have insane amounts of non-graphics processing. It's well known that games such as World of Warcraft, Rift, and Everquest were nearly always improved by upgrading your CPU before your graphics card. I upgraded a friend from a Core 2 Duo 1.3 Ghz to a Core i7 and left in the GTS 250 she had. Frame rates went up to 40 fps in town from 26 fps in town on the setting just shy of Ultimate. (We later upgraded it to a GTX 480 on her next paycheck.)

Also, about 10% of a core's time is just sucked up by Window's TCP/IP stack on XP. I've seen better CPU stats in the TCP/IP stack in 7. The best bet would be to use an Ethernet NIC that has it's own processor to handle 100% of the IP and the TCP CRC checking. The OS still needs to process TCP to know what application to give the packet to. But the IP layer is system wide and can be handled on the card.

CPU was not the topic of this thread and it is a completely separate NM hunt in the land of game engine optimization. ;-)

[Bahn]

@Krin: Then what do you theorize is causing the huge amounts of GPU overhead in this game? Obviously something doesn't seem to have been programmed right for a game like this. Games like Crysis blows this game out of water in terms of graphical fidelity, so I'd like to know from a programmer's perspective why this game causes so much stress on a top end GPU for such inefficient performance.

[Krin]

@Krin: Then what do you theorize is causing the huge amounts of GPU overhead in this game? Obviously something doesn't seem to have been programmed right for a game like this. Games like Crysis blows this game out of water in terms of graphical fidelity, so I'd like to know from a programmer's perspective why this game causes so much stress on a top end GPU for such inefficient performance.

It's likely the way the backgrounds are done. The backgrounds are actually rendered in real time. They're not a sky box. However, if you turn your background settings down, they look like 8-bit mode only with the close up stuff and your character in HD. It's likely the background is drawn as a separate buffer with down-graded settings. It's a good technique for wide open landscapes, but it still requires a pretty high level card to begin with.

Also, we've noted that FF will still work you to death if you put it in 8-bit crap mode. I agree with the guy who got trolled, something is definitely wrong with the texturing work. In my work, I have to provide several qualities of texture and set up "mip-maps". The farther away something is, the less intensive and lower-quality texture it gets. When you adjust graphics settings, the game should also have a separate set of textures for each setting. Even with background and even regular qualities set to 1, they are still jamming that hardcore, high-quality texture into the graphics card. All the issues I've seen mirror the fact that the game does not change out the textures for low quality ones. They seem to have mistakenly believed that the graphics card would down sample the textures in real-time. It's a fairly common mistake and probably explains why it melted the PS3 when they started testing it.

[Kowen]

its rendered because there is 0 fps drop when you go through the floor or stare through a wall. its pretty common sense. anything that exists through a mesh is rendered. when you go through the floor there isnt a brief pause or load in which the water is generated, because it already exists on the board.

Huh...? That's not true at all, it's very simple for the game to just not render surfaces that aren't visible.

Try keeping your camera aimed at the floor or at a wall in a laggy area, and I can guarantee it'll make your framerate go up. I do it all the time when I go AFK because it makes my GPU temperature drop a bit as well.

[Jinko]

Bumping this thread.

the usage of your CPU from this game is -insane- and far beyond the level of the graphics themselves.

PLEASE FIX!!!!

edit; I just want to point out to people "without problems" or those who immediately jump at other's computer setup: even people with the best computers and up to date hardware have graphical problems with this game and see their computers get overworked. Just because you don't see or understand the problem, does not mean it doesn't exit.

This is just typical of SE, FF11 still runs like crap on the best PC's out there.

The game seems to have a bottleneck where the CPU is concerned, going from a radeon 4800 to a 6800 should give a significant jump in fps but in reality it doesn't, something very odd is going on with this game engine, I just hope they are fixing it.

Graphics usage is the topic of this thread, sweetie.

CPU usage is an entirely OTHER beast

Don't be naive, where do you think the instructions come from to draw geometry ?