Maxed out resources or not?

[Norack]

I was just wondering something, This game runs fairly well on my new computer i just got specifically for FFXIV. However when i am in Gridania i notice some slow down. It only happens in Gridania, im assuming because Gridania is full of tress and foliage and that is harder for my graphics card to do? im not sure. Anyways even when i am there and i see that my computer is slowing down, i look at my computers resources. And I have an octo core and the game is only using 10% of my CPU and only 1.5 GB's of RAM when I have 24 GB's of RAM available to use.

So my question is, is there something wrong with my computer? or is the game for some reason not using all the available resources at its disposal and if it isn't how do i get it so my game uses more resources so it runs smoother?

[Raldo]

What is your graphics card (and its associated graphics RAM)?

[Norack]

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460, it has 4,095 MB's of memory, and has 2,048 MB's of dedicated memory

[Raldo]

/shrug Sounds like plenty. Hopefully it'll be fixed in 2.0 when they redo a bunch of stuff.

[Norack]

K i was just wondering thx for looking at my set up atleast. Like i said its not bad i mean i have alot of stuff at highest but no AA it runs perfectly fine in all areas except gridania where theres like nothing but trees. Was just curious cause on the back of the game they recommend 4 GB's of RAM. But while running my OS and this game and my web browser in the background my computer only uses 1.5 GB's of RAM. I dont understand why they recommend 4 GB's of RAM when the game wont use more than 1 GB of RAM idk.

[Hagito]

I think the only times I get "lag" is when a bunch of people are around and thats just like a spike of loading their toons then its ok, got NVIDIA GTX 550 TI, 8 GB RAM (maxed settings). It's weird that your 460 is getting some since it is supposed to be better than the GTX 550 o.O

I suppose you are running in 64 bit windows 7, am i correct?

Have you updated your NVIDIA Drivers?
http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us

[Norack]

yep im doing windows 7 pro. 64 bit

Im playing and really paying attention to it now and yeah its only in places with alot of foliage like gridania, even with lots of people needing to load them my comp. doesnt slow down its just lots of plants and stuff if im anywhere else the game runs like a dream

[Coldfire]

Happens with some GPU models and drivers. Don't think there's anything you can do other than waiting for SE to fix the buggy engine.

[Bahn]

You have the same card as me. The game was coded very poorly and wasn't properly designed to take advantage of PC hardware the way we're used to from modern Western games. It's a singlethreaded game - this is the reason why your CPU sees very little activity. It uses up RAM, but you have way more than what the game needs. The big issue with the game is that it tries to render every polygon of every single graphic model in Eorzea - it doesn't have.. I think it was LOD? textures (lower quality textures it can use from far away) to render people who aren't near you. The game has a crapton of polygons but it's not terribly efficient at them. Trees and foliage, as you noticed, are notorious for this. If you've ever tried to walk through the Christmas tree in your city, you'll know what I mean.

There's only three things you can really do to compensate for the poor optimization. Either buy an overkill GPU setup (dual SLI GTX 590's), wait for 2.0, where they promise to have a fully optimized-for-PC engine, or dial down your graphics settings so the game doesn't chug in foliage.

Oh, another thing to do, if you notice that it gets a bit jerky in town (like as though it's loading stuff), move FFXIV to an SSD. The game loads TONS of little files related to every single player character around you. This results in a lot of small read/writes (another example of how poorly optimized the game is). An SSD will mitigate these load stutters in town because of its fast random read speeds.

[Hagito]

I noticed in my settings for some reason that drawing quality was on standard, maxed it with other settings that were for some reason disabled, and was receiving like 5 FPS LOL really? I don't think this game has any better graphics than blade and soul and I can play that one on Max settings with 40+ FPS xD