Camera Stuttering and Screen Tearing

[Lerend]

I played during Open Beta as well as shortly after Release and experienced these two issues. I've recently come back to the game hoping that these would have been fixed by over a year of video card driver updates or game patches, but it appears they still persist.

Camera Stuttering: It appears the game uses two different "behaviors" for the camera, with each one presenting this issue slightly differently. When using the mouse to control the camera, it seems as if the camera gets "caught" on any terrain that is not mostly flat, causing it to zoom in slightly (as if your back was to a wall and the camera zooms in as to not clip through it) and then immediately pop back out to your chosen camera distance. This causes the *terrain* to look jagged and stuttery, especially when walking downhill. The second case is when you use the keyboard to control the character. In this case the terrain still stutters, but typically much less, and instead your *character and nameplate* stutter instead. Again, the effect is most prominent when the camera is getting "caught" on walls or if you are walking downhill and it is getting "caught" on the raised hill behind your character, but in this case seeing my nameplate jitter up and down like i'm playing through an earthquake physically gives me a headache.

The second issue is a fairly awful case of screen tearing. It occurs and sort of moves up and down the screen like theres a wavy line moving up and down, but tends to favor the bottom half of the screen more than the top. It generally appears when i'm out in the field (when theres less going on and my FPS would be higher than 60) and goes away entirely in town when my framerates usually dip between 45 and 50. I typically have screen tearing issues in games so I keep Vsync on whenever the option is available, however there is no in-game option for it with FF14 and the "force vsync" options in Catalyst Control Center don't seem to do anything at all with FF14 (i've tried all 4, same issue).

My specs:
AMD Phenom II x4 955 Black Edition 3.2 Ghz
Sapphire Radeon HD5850 1GB (only hits about 76C under max load, 11.11 drivers)
4GB GSkill DDR3 1333 RAM
Windows 7 Professional x64 (fresh install on a brand new SSD)
OCZ Vertex 3 120GB SSD
25.5" Asus LCD monitor @ 1920x1200: 60Hz

I've seen a few older posts about these issues but with no resolutions, is there any word on a possible fix, or is this more of a "wait for the new engine and pray it gets sorted out" sort of thing?
Thanks.

[nasomi]

Have you tried setting AA to 4 or 8x? that may help. To be honest I'm not sure what screen tearing looks like as I've never had it, but sounds like buffering will help the issue. Your specs look more than sufficient to run on medium settings, other than slightly low on ram. I hit about 4gb total when running not much other than ffxiv, and up to 5.5gb when I start browsing and watching videos.

[Lerend]

Have you tried setting AA to 4 or 8x? that may help. To be honest I'm not sure what screen tearing looks like as I've never had it, but sounds like buffering will help the issue. Your specs look more than sufficient to run on medium settings, other than slightly low on ram. I hit about 4gb total when running not much other than ffxiv, and up to 5.5gb when I start browsing and watching videos.

I've tried AA x2, x4, x8, and off. It's not the models themselves that are jagged, its the camera movement that is stuttering. Low settings, high settings, doesn't matter. The screen tearing and camera stutter are still there.

As for the screen tearing, for the quick and dirty explanation it happens when the next frame gets drawn to screen out of sync with the rate at which the screen refreshes completely, causing part of your screen to be displaying the current frame while the remainder of the screen is still displaying the previous frame. It typically happens when you're getting a framerate higher than the refresh rate of your monitor (usually 60Hz). Enabling Vsync is supposed to limit your framerate to 60 even if your system *could* draw frames faster than that so as to not go over the refresh rate and thus never draw frames faster than the monitor can refresh them. Unfortunately, the game itself does not have a Vsync option built into the engine, and forcing Vsync in Catalyst Control Center has always had issues where it just *doesnt* enforce Vsync with a lot of applications. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_tearing for more information.

As for my RAM, I have no idea what you're doing in the background where you're using almost 6 gigs of ram just watching videos o.O Idling with a handful of regular-use applications open i'm hitting about ~1.5GB usage and i've yet to find an application that's topped out the full 4GB. I'm running most settings in FF14 around the "high" range and everything looks beautiful and stable between 45 and 60 FPS (forcing vsync *is* capping me at 60 FPS, but the tearing is still there ><) aside from these two minor annoyances.

Further googling lead me to some threads where people claimed that D3Doverrider/Rivatuner/MSI Afterburner successfully enforced Vsync and eliminated their screen tearing issues, but i'd rather not run unstable and outdated tools and possibly damage my system just to get rid of an annoying screen line.

[Soukyuu]

Don't quote me on it, but can it be an ATI issue? I don't see any screen tearing on my 260GTX.
Oh and MSI Afterburner is not outdated...

[Ranara]

I had the same problem I believe its due to the vsync. I solved it on mine by forcing vsync on nvidia control panel. I know you said it wouldn't work for you but Im 95% sure this is the problem.

[Soukyuu]

I just had this camera stuttering today in limsa, only happened if i fully zoomed out though, one zoom level below and everything is fine again. Maybe it's bugged..

[Lerend]

Don't quote me on it, but can it be an ATI issue? I don't see any screen tearing on my 260GTX.
Oh and MSI Afterburner is not outdated...

From what i've managed to skim from ancient forum posts around release, it seems like ATI cards are affected by this a lot more (probably due to the poor vsync enforcement). The tearing is definitely a vsync issue and I read a few people fixed it by using MSI Afterburner to enforce 100% Vsync.

However, I have a Sapphire card, not an MSI card, and the last official update to afterburner was v2.1.0 released on 2/15/11, almost a year ago. I'd rather not take the risk of it not playing nice with the latest drivers or a non-msi card just for a little bit of screen tearing.

As for the stutter, it's driving me up the wall :/

[Soukyuu]

As long as you don't play around with voltages/clocking, all it does is monitoring though.

[Lerend]

An update on the camera stuttering: It seems to go away completely while riding a Chocobo. I don't know whats different in the camera when riding a bird and walking, but while riding the camera smoothly transitions between positions when it gets pushed forward by terrain behind your character. When walking it just jarringly snaps back and forth.

[Drako]

I got this same issue, with 2x 5770s. It hasnt bugged me enough to adjust settings, but i might try vsync and see what happens..