Square please allow the game to fully utilize hardware!

[snuggans]

a lot of players already know this but i still feel we have to draw more attention to it: the game just isn't fully utilizing your hardware, especially if its more recent hardware. city aetherytes & large crowds tank the fps in ways that the benchmark does not, the benchmark is hella theoretical and not practical, its just vaguely rating your setup with a useless number, i just don't care if a certain gpu/cpu can get 373 avg fps on the benchmark because when you go to lower limsa it will get brought down to 80-100. and why is that? because for example the cpu usage will be at 17%, gpu usage will be at 44%, despite your fps not being at refresh rate/cap.

after the graphical upgrade, this should be the next logical step, since the upgrade reduced framerates, now it would be great to offset that downturn. on another note, DLSS/FSR implementation seems... incomplete? DLSS seems to do nothing, while FSR at least allows you to change the scaling yet the fps remains the same. there seems to be a lot of work to be done in these areas

[Jeeqbit]

DLSS applies the AA itself, and the scaling happens if you go below a certain FPS (this is undesirable, so I set it to 30).

I don't know why it would be tanking your FPS that much. I think my FPS only got low when I used a laptop years ago, and at a certain spot in Urqopacha. I don't go to Limsa much but never have a problem really.

I'm more concerned about SE utilizing their own server hardware. For all their 24-hour infrastructure maintenances, what do they have to show for it? Taking 3 seconds to slowly iterate 32 times?

[Ath192]

IIRC the reason your FPS tanks is because FFXIV is CPU bound and uses very few cores. So if you open your task manager you will see 1 core at 100% and the rest very low, that gives you the 17% CPU usage or whatever. So yes, FFXIV could be improved to use all CPU cores and I think that would go a long way.

When you play at 4K it does become very GPU intensive, but the slowdowns you are talking about are because of the large quantity of players running around and your CPU calculating the positions for all of them. This is why the benchmark is smooth, there are no player movements to calculate.

It happens at Aetherytes because that's where a lot of people congregate. Thats also why we get instanced zones at the beginning of each expansion. Less people, less CPU strain, less FPS drops.

[Mirau]

IIRC the reason your FPS tanks is because FFXIV is CPU bound and uses very few cores. So if you open your task manager you will see 1 core at 100% and the rest very low, that gives you the 17% CPU usage or whatever. So yes, FFXIV could be improved to use all CPU cores and I think that would go a long way.

When you play at 4K it does become very GPU intensive, but the slowdowns you are talking about are because of the large quantity of players running around and your CPU calculating the positions for all of them. This is why the benchmark is smooth, there are no player movements to calculate.

It happens at Aetherytes because that's where a lot of people congregate. Thats also why we get instanced zones at the beginning of each expansion. Less people, less CPU strain, less FPS drops.

Exactly this, you can't really fix the draw calls the game has when it's rendering so many player characters at once without multi-threading taking the brunt. Unfortunately this game (1.0) was designed around a time that it was common place to only use the main core and then a few for extra tasks. They didn't rewrite this in 2.0 (ARR), so we're stuck with a 10+ year handling of CPU logic from days of old. Not that modern gaming utilizes CPU cores very well anyways... I'm sure they've done some optimizations over the years but it's still not good enough for using anything above [Normal] setting in (Other): Character and Object Quantity.

The only real way to improve CPU-bound FPS by an ok amount here is to buy the 3D cache CPUs from AMD. Not everyone is willing to shell out that cash though, understandably.

[Valence]

XIV has always used most of my cpu cores. Current basic Ryzen using all of them.
I am a mere 3D artist however, so all I can tell you is that drawcalls are more complicated than just the cpu load. More knowledgeable people will probably know.

[Jeeqbit]

Unfortunately this game (1.0) was designed around a time that it was common place to only use the main core and then a few for extra tasks. They didn't rewrite this in 2.0 (ARR), so we're stuck with a 10+ year handling of CPU logic from days of old. Not that modern gaming utilizes CPU cores very well anyways...

It's sad if this also explains their servers.