graphics card/processor help!

[Vanguard319]

I woul suggest checking for driver updates if you haven't already. That can help improve your gpu's performance.

[Kiara]

A single 6950/560TI can max ff14 1080p at 60fps the fps in populated areas will depend greatly on CPU but having a 560 or a 580 will give the same FPS at 1080p. So id only recomend the 580 if you plan on going over 1080p/multi monitor. Also the 580 needs alot of power as the 6950/560TI both draw 140w the 580 draws 363w so you would need atleast a good brand 650-700w PSU Corsair/Antec/Seasonic/XFX where with a 6950/560TI you could keep yr 550w PSU not to mention case airflow the 580 can get really hot in small/bad airflow cases.

Hi Zorlin,

Thanks for the information.

Do you know if Nvidia is planning a new line of cards in the near future (like AMD is doing), so that we'd see a price drop of a 560 or 580?

Thanks.

[Zorlin]

No release date yet but its already in the works, they mentioned Q4 2011(fiscal year).

[Zorlin]

Wait.... some people must have some really poor settings or staring at some walls when they get these 60 fps claims. I've run the game on a Phenom II 940+ATI 5970 @ 1680x1060, i7 980X+2x nVidia GTX480M @ 1920x1080 and 2x Xeon X5680+2x AMD 5970 @ 1920x1200 and 2560x1600, I think the only time I could get stable 60.... was never. It would always dip at some point. And Sandy Bridge will have a performance boost over any of those listed.

couldnt agree more.

[Aenarion]

Wait.... some people must have some really poor settings or staring at some walls when they get these 60 fps claims. I've run the game on a Phenom II 940+ATI 5970 @ 1680x1060, i7 980X+2x nVidia GTX480M @ 1920x1080 and 2x Xeon X5680+2x AMD 5970 @ 1920x1200 and 2560x1600, I think the only time I could get stable 60.... was never. It would always dip at some point. And Sandy Bridge will have a performance boost over any of those listed.

eh, I pretty much get stable 60fps everywhere except in the cities(namely uldah), where I would go between 45-55 for the most part.

this is on a i7 920@4.0ghz w/ gtx580 @ 1920x1200, windowed, 8x csaa, general draw @ 8, background @ 5, shadow on high, texture on high, tex. filter on highest, no AO/DoF as I dislike those effects.

[ispano]

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.

[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.