graphics card/processor help!

[Bahn]

Stable 60 fps means stable 60 fps everywhere. The chokehold in cities is the CPU. Almost all MMOs have the same issue. When I OC those Xeons from 3.33Ghz to 4.3Ghz(high as they'll go :/) my min fps goes up. But a Sandy Bridge chip can easily out do them.

Eh? I thought part of the reason why we were getting the crazy stuttering in cities was due to the numerous amounts of random reads that are being made from the HD to load everyone's player models. Many people have been able to mitigate this by moving their FFXIV install to a SSD, so I imagine if you were to put FFXIV on a top tier SSD or some sort of striped RAID-0 configuration on a hardware RAID controller, you can pretty much eliminate the stutters (that is the main reason for the framerate drops).

What do you think makes for better FPS with a stronger CPU in town? I know overclocking them can help a bit, but the biggest problem here is that FFXIV is supposedly either a single or dual-threaded game. I can never get the game to max out all 4 cores of my i7 965 myself. :/

[ispano]

Almost all games have a thread which is difficult to break up and split across multiple cores. MMOs fall under this type of game. The process has to be done in order, and splitting it up around cores can screw with the timing. Some thing might finish early, or late, or whatever, and it throws it all out of wack. Things like Audio and whatnot you can split off, and they usually do. So this thread is not only processing what everyone is doing around you, it also has to send that data to the GPU. So if it's not fast enough to do that, the data to the GPU slows down and the fps drops. So overclocking alleviates that to a degree. Also if the engine is horribly optimized as it is, it's not using the resources as efficiently as it could. And that goes along with the game not using the whole CPU efficiently. Even if they design it well, it still may not. CPUs are designed to do many many things, but sometimes it just can;t use certain functions of the CPU and just simply cannot max it out. Overclocking still has an effect here since it just does more in the same time.

[Aenarion]

yea... SSD helps with the stuttering, but it's not that big of a difference.

[ispano]

yea... SSD helps with the stuttering, but it's not that big of a difference.

Yeah and the main reason it helps is that FFXIV is like 11 gigs, yet ~200,000 files. Whereas something like EVE is 10.3 gigs and only ~800 files.

[Zorlin]

The stuttering only happens while things are being load into RAM for example when you log in uldah and has to load tons of gear sets and players. I only get that for about 15sec then its runs normaly again and yes thats HDD fault, a SDD helps alot or a raid setup.

[Coldfire]

The stuttering only happens while things are being load into RAM for example when you log in uldah and has to load tons of gear sets and players. I only get that for about 15sec then its runs normaly again and yes thats HDD fault, a SDD helps alot or a raid setup.

But only a fast SSD... there's lots of garbage being sold too so better be careful when spending 200 bucks on it. Well actually even the fast ones have some samples that are broken on delivery xD
Btw those people that can't get 60fps should stop watching pr0n in the background

[Lucifer]

SSD is so amazing.
No more NPC's loading on screen. They are there before I even think about them.

[Kiara]

SSD is so amazing.
No more NPC's loading on screen. They are there before I even think about them.

Hi Lucifer, Coldfire, and All,

What are some great brand/models of SSDs to look for?

Thanks~

[Zorlin]

Budget: Crucial 300 64Gb
Better: OCZ Solid 3 120Gb
Performance: OCZ Vertex 3(SATA3) <- Recomended or even the Vertex 2(SATA2)
If money not a problem get an OCZ RevoDrive with read/write up to 1500MB/s

[Lucifer]

Crucial is really good.
64 GB for your OS and two-three games.
You can fill it to the brim and you will not experience any slow downs.

Never perform a defragmentation on these babies.

OCZ with 1500MB/s Read/write speeds are for very wealthy people.