Want to upgrade my computer for this game, need some advice.

[NoahArks]

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Shouldnt use futuremark, there's also a bigger difference between them, lol. Use userbenchmarks, cpubenchmark and cinebench. Also you suggested a 970, but it costs more than a 390, it runs slower and has less than half of it's vram. To get more performance than a 390, it needs to be fully OC'd. He should change his whole system, but he doesn't have to change his gpu right away. If he has 300-500 to spend now, he might have another 300-400 a few months later. Also, you still think I said that you don't notice the difference between 30-40fps and 60fps. I said it gives no benefits OVER it in THIS game. How the topic creator appears to me he wants a system just for gaming. I just can't suggest amd for that, mostly because they excel at multicore performance, while gaming still makes the most use out of single cores. Intel dominates on the gaming market. In the long term he's better with a i5 than a fx 8350.

[Judge_Xero]

Going from the FX 6300 to the FX 8350 will make zero difference outside of the slight difference in core speed. But since the FX 6300 can be oveclocked to the exact same specs as the FX 8350 it would be the worst upgrade option, considering FFXIV does not require more than 4 cores but rather, stronger individual cores.

Upgrading the GPU from a GTX 660 to a GTX 970 while keeping the FX 6300 would be a terrible option too because like NoahArks say you will have even more exteme FPS swings going from min/max FPS so it would cause the game to look even more choppy.

If OP does have a decent CPU cooler (Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo or equivalent) then I'd definitely recommend trying the Graphics Settings changes I suggested and doing a small CPU overclock on the FX 6300.

I wrote an Overclocking Guide a while back for the Bulldozer/Piledriver CPU's which can be found here. http://www.overclock.net/t/1348623/a...us-motherboard

Overall I feel that OP's current system is pretty well balanced for this game barring those couple of changes. IMO spending $300-500 in order to render an additional 30 people who are not within camera view does not seem worth it.

[Krindor]

I said it gives no benefits OVER it in THIS game

First of all that is the average FPS and it does to a lesser extent affect the performance the biggest problem is the drop of FPS during graphics intensive moments where the GPU isn't able to render everything, one really noticeable moment is the plumes in titan extreme, with shadows at max they are going to drop the FPS to a level where it actually becomes really hard dodging them. Also the OP wants to run it at max meaning he cares about how the game looks, playing at a lower frame rate is going to affect the enjoyment of the game, at least in my opinion. Also limiting the FPS to 60 will make most spike less noticeable and the only area where the spikes are noticeable are when there are a lot of player characters to render. It all depends on what the OP is going to do in the game. For people who hunt the CPU upgrade might be useful while for people who raid the GPU might be more useful considering that the amount of stuff the CPU renders is less when there is only a few characters and mobs to render.

[Raist]

Performance scales dramatically on the CPU as you move towards about 4GHz because of how it distributes the load. The same goes for system memory as you approach the 10-12GB/sec transfer rate.

Until you can optimally fill the pipeline feeding your GPU, the GPU will be under utilized in this game. Need to get it tweaked on the front-side first, then tweak the GPU. You can verify this quite easily on an older system with a dual-core and older GPU's from 2012 and back. The game was originally designed to run on those systems after all.

[NoahArks]

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Are you really using a example of titan? Cause the first two sentences isn't exactly how it would work. It's not going to effect the enjoyment of the game, pc gamers just want to tell that to themselfs to feel better (yes I'm a PC gamer to). Next up you're going to come up with the myth that 30fps occurs headaches and is bad to the eyes? In this game 30fps or 60fps doesn't really matter. Both work fine, both are smooth, with 60fps being able to render things smoother. The way you're trying to explain to get a gpu over anything else will only hurt the guy in the longterm, including me three people have already said that the system will be bottlenecked if you upgrade the gpu on the current cpu or on a 8350. You can defend your point more and more, but you're still coming with the same argument.

[Judge_Xero]

Yeah, that's why I wanted to emphasize to the fact that even with my i7 4790k and a GTX 980 I have FPS dips due to the way this game is coded.

In open areas I get like 150 FPS and in congested areas I still see dips close to 30 FPS while my GPU is hovering around 20-25% usage.

That's why I've played around with the settings to get a solid 60+ FPS. It's just not efficient coding for rendering other players since it'll max a single core while the others are like 30% usage.

I'm not convinced that the Titan Plumes are effected by a GPU issue, since I've run Titan EX on my laptop with a GTX 740m and the gameplay is still fluid (+30 FPS) and a GTX 660 is lightyears ahead of a mobile 740m.

Other systems I've run this game on with 1080p resolution

Phenom II X4 + GTX 550ti (20-30 FPS)
Intel Core 2 Quad + GTX 550ti (20-30 FPS)
FX 8350 + R9 290
Pentium G3248 Dual Core + R9 290

the only system that had any significant issues was the Dual Core Intel as it was pegged at 99% usage. I had to turn the # of Rendered Objects to the minimum to get nice even frames.

[Krindor]

Snip

If you provide me with a benchmark showing the bottleneck of the CPU in this game and that the CPU upgrade would be better I'll agree to your statement but as long as the only thing you say is that it isn't enough I'm still going to say that the GPU is going to be the better upgrade. I'm not saying that the bottleneck is non existant only that it isn't as extreme.

And to the enjoyment part it is definitely going to affect it if the FPS is too low, for me the game just feels sluggish.

Snip

My experience on lagging plumes in titan was from a laptop with 750m, with shadows at medium or max the plumes would cause the game to lag really badly.

If you tried it on the FX 8350 would you still say that the overall perfromance of the game wouldn't be better with a better GPU? Also the OP asked for the computer to be able to run it on max. The 660 isn't going to make it with max settings.

[NoahArks]

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Well you can keep saying that. I atleast hope that the topic creator will listen to the other people instead of you. Since the facts won't change.

[Raist]

Compare your CPU scores with something like the passmark database. You can search for a particular model and the sort by speed/rank or click off multiple models from the list to compare them. Can do the same with GPU's as well. Might be surprised the differences you see between some models. IDK how many times I thought I had stumbled on a deal for a substantial upgrade only to find it wasn't worth the investment.

[Judge_Xero]

My experience on lagging plumes in titan was from a laptop with 750m, with shadows at medium or max the plumes would cause the game to lag really badly.

If you tried it on the FX 8350 would you still say that the overall perfromance of the game wouldn't be better with a better GPU? Also the OP asked for the computer to be able to run it on max. The 660 isn't going to make it with max settings.

Well, before my current Rig I had an Intel i5 4670k while using the AMD R9 290. Going from the FX 8350 at Max Settings to the i5 4670k at Max setting there was a noticeable difference in congested areas, but comparing the difference while having the game reduce the number of players rendered, there was no difference, visibly.

Even with the lesser Core2 Quad and the GTX 550ti, if I played with Objects Rendered at Medium then it could handle 20-30 FPS at Maximum Eye candy.

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I suppose if the OP got a GTX 970 while keeping the FX 6300 - Overclock it and reduced the number of Rendered Objects then they would see more performance than what the GTX 660 gives. It would just be subjective on whether there is a visible difference, since it would probably be a case of:

45-60 FPS VS 50-90 FPS