[Dev] Overtaxation of PC Hardware

[Dragon]

* The highest recommended specifications for any PC game in history.

Only at this point in time, your point?

I looked for an official Dev tag for UI and client optimization however I was sadly not able to find one, so I just put [Dev] in the topic hoping this will find its way to the correct team. My main focus of this topic is to hope that SE will look and resolve the primary issues surrounding the PC Client and the intense taxation it has on our PC hardware. I am not sure if the issues surrounding the game and the immense stress it has on PC related functions are a result of the engine used to code the game, RMT/BOT prevention, or just utter poor coding on the original teams part.

FFXIV as stated in beta many numerous times is capped at using only 2 Cores or threads on a PC, no matter what. I am not a programmer but I imagine sadly this probably cannot be changed even tho a vast majority of users have Quad and 6 Core Processors, it seems the threading on these 2 cores is capping at 60-80% CPU usage, which is utterly horrid and causing unneeded stress on our CPU's. I am hoping the Dev team will be able to look into this before summertime, as I am vastly afraid of what the summertime heat is going to do to my PC in particular, but others as well.

Memory Leaks - Seriously SE WTF, Please tell me why in gods name it is necessary after 4-6 hours of play for FFXIV to be eating up 1.5GB of Physical RAM on a consistent basis. NO PROGRAM has ever done this. Why does FFXIV have such bad memory leaks, these memory holes cannot be good for the game much less creating yet again even more stress on our systems. I shutter to think how bad the PS3 version will function if this is not resolved. Unless SE PS3 have more RAM then the store released ones which sadly only have 512 MB of RAM, I can see no way that this game will even function on a PS3 with the way this game eats through RAM, was this done to prevent the problems that plagued FFXI, or once again was this just bad coding.

GPU Usage - I have no idea on how to even begin to address this one, But this game seriously overtaxes a GPU. Why when launching the client and getting the login screen does a GPU temp jump from 32C to 50C and you are not even in the game yet. This game is going to fry a lot of peoples PC's that cannot afford to watercool come summer. My GPU alone while running FFXIV in this joke of a window mode is sitting at 85C on 1920x1080. You may not see the inability to Alt-Tab properly as an issue, but these various little quirks are going to destroy peoples hardware. Most people do not have just 1 monitor, and your security measures or miscodings are preventing people from using what they have paid for.

Please SE dedicate a group of people to properly fixing the client for the PC, before you begin to work on the PS3 version, remember PC users are your client base as well, and currently your only customers playing FFXIV.

I agree about the GPU, my MSI Geforce NGTX480 tends to run an average of 70~80C with this game open (thankfully, it's meant to handle that temperature); on the other hand, it hardly utilizes my i7-920 at all, which gets to 50*C at its highest. If SE utilized the cores to at least help handle as much of the resolution as it can without sacrificing utilization to anything else, that could especially go a long ways.

Further information: My GTX260 ran FFXIV on medium settings quite well once the beta ended and even ran better once Nvidia released their 260.99 drivers. My GTX480 is currently running at 60FPS on high-settings, but not maxed in except in one area (I forget which it is), and have AO/DoF turned off too. (I'm definitely looking forward to how it'll run once I have EVGA's Classified Edition GTX590, that's for sure.)

[Elkwood]

Bumping to keep topic Active and on everyones minds

[InuraBera]

Just as a point of interest for anyone using an AMD/ATI graphics card.

I recently picked up the latest drivers for my card (In the AMD Radeon HD6900 series running on Windows 7 64-bit), along with the 'patch' released to help out with Brink and various other issues. Since installing these, along with fixing Brink (the program I originally installed it for) Final Fantasy XIV also runs a lot faster and quieter, not entirely sure about heat however.

http://sites.amd.com/us/game/downloa...win7-64.aspx#1 is the driver page
http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles...15ahotfix.aspx is the hotfix page.

At the very least, it may help out some of you for the moment. Along with that, I have found the game has been running better after certain patches and such, though that may just be placebo.

[AlexiaKidd]

I'm going to have to give that a try as I've got a HD6950 so hopefully I'll get the same little boost ^^

[Colino]

Just as a point of interest for anyone using an AMD/ATI graphics card.

I recently picked up the latest drivers for my card (In the AMD Radeon HD6900 series running on Windows 7 64-bit), along with the 'patch' released to help out with Brink and various other issues. Since installing these, along with fixing Brink (the program I originally installed it for) Final Fantasy XIV also runs a lot faster and quieter, not entirely sure about heat however.

http://sites.amd.com/us/game/downloa...win7-64.aspx#1 is the driver page
http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles...15ahotfix.aspx is the hotfix page.

At the very least, it may help out some of you for the moment. Along with that, I have found the game has been running better after certain patches and such, though that may just be placebo.

Thanks for that, I'll give it a try myself.

[Chrees]

Just as a point of interest for anyone using an AMD/ATI graphics card.

I recently picked up the latest drivers for my card (In the AMD Radeon HD6900 series running on Windows 7 64-bit), along with the 'patch' released to help out with Brink and various other issues. Since installing these, along with fixing Brink (the program I originally installed it for) Final Fantasy XIV also runs a lot faster and quieter, not entirely sure about heat however.

http://sites.amd.com/us/game/downloa...win7-64.aspx#1 is the driver page
http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles...15ahotfix.aspx is the hotfix page.

At the very least, it may help out some of you for the moment. Along with that, I have found the game has been running better after certain patches and such, though that may just be placebo.

Wow, thanks for this! Just installed it, and I've got everything maxed out (aside from General Drawing being at 8 and DoF and AO being off) and I'm getting about 40-45 FPS at Broken Water...while it's raining! Which is about what I was getting before with most everything on Standard and AA off.

I might still turn some settings down because I do notice some camera lag which bothers me, but it's still much better than before! Thank you!

[TheRac25]

I know ATI is horrid with drivers

orly? http://media.arstechnica.com/news.me...stacrash-1.jpg

[SilvertearRen]

Well. Here are my specs, I recently upgraded...

AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Processor at 3.2Ghz.
8 Gigabytes of RAM
Radeon 5870.

And guess what I see in the Control Center?

GPU at 99% load, when idling in FFXIV. The average temperature is 77 degrees Celsius. This is a problem. One of the most powerful graphics cards from the previous generation of video cards (which happened to be top of the line when XIV first launched), and the game can't be optimized so that it doesn't burn up my GPU?!

I think Square Enix needs to take optimizing their client for the PC platform seriously, because this is a major problem. Worse still, the client does not take full advantage of all six cores on my processor - it only seems to be utilizing two cores at the most.

My advice to the programming team: Implement code that will "seek out" additional cores on a computer and use them for graphics/physics processing where needed. Most game developers do this.

Oh, and reduce the retarded overhead on the GPU please. I don't want to see my video card die an early death due to some idiot programmer's lack of graphics programming aptitude. (Note to Yoshi-P: If my video card dies while playing FFXIV, I'm sending you the bill for a replacement. I'm not joking - got the Air Mail envelope ready in my filing cabinet.)

P.S. The fact that FFXIV is a DirectX 9 game, and we all likely have DirectX 11 video cards, is a little more than upsetting: Most DX9 games these days run GREAT on our video cards, yet FFXIV doesn't. -.-

[Tiraelina]

77c-85c is normal under load, if it bothers you that much turn the fan up.

[Swev]

I have it on low settings and its ok for me so far and only have a 100 doller video card with an old quad core intel cpu and 4gb of ram. I do get crashes for playing along time and teleporting to new areas seems laggy. (game still looks very nice on low settings)

Right now first starting out game cpu useage is at 35% and 418mb memory used.