Quote Originally Posted by Laraul View Post
Looking thru the forums is not the most accurate way of determining the source of a technical problem. I am going to go ahead and state It's most likely not the Radeon Card!

I am going to quickly ask what filesystem is the drive formatted as? I assume NTFS as it should but it possibly could be FAT or ExFAT. If you don't know don't worry cuz it's unlikely to be something other than NTFS.

Because your drive was having issues with other applications prior to updating the drive firmware I have to suspect it's the drive. Even after the firmware update it's possible the problem may still exhibit the problem. Especially if the firmware attempts to mask a defect in the drive.

Bear in mind the FFXIV folder contains a whopping 150,000 or so individual files. Far more than what is commonly expected.
and that's why lowering the graphics settings helped >.>;; sure. it's not the card.

no matter how you look at it, the radeon drivers are not optimized. period. for this reason it should always be suspected first. if you look through the TS forums and 80% of rendering problems are associated with one set of hardware, it is safe to assume that the hardware has issues and the drivers are not optimized. when you check the official forums of the brand and see the exact same thing: you can take it to the bank. i cannot think of a more accurate way to determine the source of a technical problem without physically being behind someone else's PC. enlighten me please if you know of another way.

he's got a bottle neck somewhere. that much is obvious. lowering the load on the GPU (IE: graphical settings) and now he doesn't lock up. it's possible that he fixed a symptom of the true bottle neck, but i'm still banking it's the GPU.

He's got a decent mobo. processor should be able to handle the load (unless he has a ton of background apps). it could be the SSD, but the variances do not suggest this. For his symptoms I would recommend looking at processor=>GPU=>power/voltages/ram=>SSD. the GPU is the most likely culprit, because it's ALWAYS the most likely culprit. even more so because 1) it's radeon 2) radeon drivers are not optimized for FFXIV