graphics card/processor help!

[Coldfire]

Here you go i7 2600k stock ff14 at 1024x768 yes thats right it cant pull more fps even at that res while the card load is at 10%. Hope you understand it now. If dont well why not try it yrself?

http://imageshack.us/f/221/semttuloebu.jpg/ 1024x768

http://imageshack.us/f/88/semttulo2kg.jpg/ 1920x1080

Weird right? Reason CPU bottleneck.

Resolution only stresses the TMUs but this game usually bottlenecks at the vector-transformation. So lowering the resolution doesn't always mean that the game will run faster. Overclocking the GPU can give a few frames more though.

[nasomi]

Bring up your task manager and a gpu monitor, and see what they're doing and post some screenshots, because I've well exceeded 44fps on high settings at 1920x1200, and my cpu never went past 20-30%. I have a feeling either something is wrong with your processor or you have some other limiting factor, there' sno way the cpu will get bogged like that.

[Aenarion]

Been building pcs for 15years worked in 2 hardware stores been an oc/hardware fan for years believe me i know what im saying. the i7 2600k bottlenecks ff14 with everything maxed at 1080p. Ill get some screenies in abit. download MSI afterburner and have gfx loads on screen when a gfx load is not 100% and yr fps arent cap at 60 means yr cpu is bottleneck in this case its the engine fault. you think they building an engine from scratch just cause they have free time?
Nasomi a 6950 alone can max ff14 at 1080p. ive got both my 6950 mod into 6970s. Crossfire/no cf gives the same fps. It is CPU bottleneck not cause the cpu isnt powerful but the engine makes bad use of multiple cores. youll have a core at the 80%-90% while others being way lower. Just try it yrself show me 60fps in uldah in a populated place.

I beg to differ, as far as I can tell, the slowdowns when there are a lot of characters on screen isn't really due to gpu/cpu limitations (or even hdd for that matter, if you're not moving).

Case in point: right now I'm hovering between 49-51 fps @ 1920x1200 windowed mode, standing in front of a very populated area in uldah. My gpu load? 60-65%, and cpu load is around 25%, with no cores exceeding 50%. My guess is that there's some network-involved slowdowns caused by the brilliant design that is the ff14 server/engine.

my system is a i7 920 and a 580gtx, which is decidedly less capable than a 2600k.

[Zorlin]

http://imageshack.us/f/38/semttulorgk.jpg/
there you go HT off so you can notice it better. And theres nothing wrong with this 2600k its actualy my 3rd since i do alot of oc/benchmark and took me 3 cpus find a good bin it does 5.6ghz with 2 cores on air.

[Aenarion]

@ zorlin

I think we're just disagreeing on what's bogging the game down. You pin it on a cpu bottleneck caused by the game engine, I say it's network related, as the slowdowns for me scales directly with how many other players are on screen, as opposed to what's actually rendered on screen, and have zero correlation with my cpu/gpu load.

[Zorlin]

"as the slowdowns for me scales directly with how many other players are on screen" you know players have alot more polys then the world itself right? Honestly i really doubt network has anything to do with FPS makes no sence at all. Specily since if i OC to 4.5Ghz i get 60fps in the same place. Its pretty clear to me that one of ff14 threads taxes one of yr cores making single core speed important here since that thread cant be handled by multiple cores due to engine issues.

[Aenarion]

"as the slowdowns for me scales directly with how many other players are on screen" you know players have alot more polys then the world itself right? Honestly i really doubt network has anything to do with FPS makes no sence at all. Specily since if i OC to 4.5Ghz i get 60fps in the same place. Its pretty clear to me that one of ff14 threads taxes one of yr cores making single core speed important here since that thread cant be handled by multiple cores due to engine issues.

It's just a guess, as high server load in eve online can turn the client into a slide-show (though admittedly I don't remember if the game was still running at normal fps while the screen was frozen due to server lag). I just can't see how it's cpu-bound when the load gets to barely 60% on any of the cores with overall utilization in the mid-low 20%. (my 920 is @ 4.0ghz)

Now that I think about it, I wonder if it's something specific to the cities that's causing the slow downs. Right now i'm out here at halatali, with more characters on-screen than I had in uldah in a dust-storm, and it's at a smooth 60 fps.

[Zorlin]

Last time i went to natalan with like 40ppl quite lot of enemies around us and windy weather my fps came down to low 20s while my gfx load was hiting 60-70% thats when i decided to look at core graphs for the 1st time and one of em was hiting 90s while others were in the 30s then i did this few tests in uldah. Btw this doesnt happen in gridania or limsa since theres pretty much noone there and that core barely hits 50% load.

[nasomi]

Oddly, something about gridania always gives me the worst FPS there. Character models don't make much of a differeance in gpu load, if any at all, just hdd, but since giving ffxiv a dedicated ssd that problem has gone away. I don't want to cap 60fps, I want to be int he 40's and 50's, meaning that i'm hitting some limitation, however it's never been close to being the cpu, always the gpu or hdd.

Also, you have only ffxiv running, i have ffxiv with higher settings, higher resolution, 3 monitors, a million chrome tabs, video playback, excel, and a dozen other things, and yet my cpu usage is lower than yours... And I don't overclock anything. Hmm...

[nasomi]

What are you using to monitor your gpu?