Ideal Smoothness: Cap Game at 30 FPS or Constant 40-60 FPS Fluctuation?

[Bulwarkz]

System Hardware:

• OS - Windows 7 64bit

• CPU - e6700 ( Wolfdale ) 3.2GHz~

• GPU - HIS Radeon HD 6750 ( OC'd )

• RAM - 4GB DDR3 @ 1066MHz~

• HDD - SATA 1TB

• Diablotek ATX Mid Tower Diamond Case w/ 400W PSU

ATI Tray Tools & CCC Settings:

• AA - Use Application Settings; Box Filter; Multi-sample AA

• Surface Format Optimization - Enabled

• Tessellation - AMD Optimized Enabled

• AF - 16x; Quality w/ Trilinear

• Triple buffering - Enabled

• Texture - High Quality

• MipMap - High Quality

• V-Sync - Forced

* ATI Tray Tools nor CCC will force AA, AF, or V-Sync onto FFXIV for me; they don't work.

FFXIV Settings:

• Fullscreen

• 1600x900 ( Native )

• 2x MSAA ( Game deteriorates above this )

• General Drawing Quality 8 ( Game deteriorates above this )

• Background Drawing Quality Max

• Shadow Detail High ( Game deteriorates above this )

• AO / DoF OFF ( Game deteriorates when on )

• Texture Quality Max

• Texture Filtering Max

• Physics / Detailed Drawing On

Now whether I throw everything down or have it set that way, I have 20-30 FPS in specific parts of Ul'dah and 40-60 FPS everywhere else. I've seen a lot of people talking about the 'inevitable town opposed to everywhere else' FPS issue.

It's pretty well known about FFXIV's poor optimization due to having a single-player console engine. There's some tricks to the trade for performance so the game doesn't deteriorate which I listed above, but that's about all you can do. The optimization within FFXIV 2.0 will fix this. The Producer letters and whatnot explain this.

So towns are a lost cause. However for everything else, I enjoy the vibrancy of the higher frame rate, but the hectic fluctuation causes the luxury to stutter. Should I cap the game at 30 FPS or deal with a constant 40-60 FPS fluctuation; what would be best for ideal smoothness and playability?

[Estellios]

If you want consistency I'd just go with 30 fps for now honestly.

[Bulwarkz]

If you want consistency I'd just go with 30 fps for now honestly.

Thank you. I just wanted to note that I got my hands on RivaTuner's D3DOverRider and it does force V-Sync. The game is night and day with it. The camera stuttering and tearing are completely gone, while the FPS consistency seems to have benefited because of it.

[Elexia]

Cap at 30 FPS, let CCC handle ALL of the sparklies (turn on morphological filtering.) Hell it runs a bit smoothly even with AO on if you play your cCC settings correctly.

[Alhanelem]

It's pretty well known about FFXIV's poor optimization due to having a single-player console engine.

it's not a "single player console engine." Crystal Tools was made to be portable to every platform you can think of, from PC to Mac to PS3 to Wii. Though the client does have its issues, most of the technical problems are server engine problems not problems iwth the game client's engine.

Consistency doesn't really mean anything. I'd rather have the highest frame rate possible at all times.

[Dhalmel]

Cap to 30 till you get a better system, ideally Ivy Bridge

[Coldfire]

it's not a "single player console engine." Crystal Tools was made to be portable to every platform you can think of, from PC to Mac to PS3 to Wii. Though the client does have its issues, most of the technical problems are server engine problems not problems iwth the game client's engine.

It was originally designed for few characters to be shown at a time and minimal memory usage. It's pretty much a fact that this engine was never meant to be used for an mmorpg on modern PCs. The engine is also old and the PC-port pretty unstable.