[Dev] Overtaxation of PC Hardware

[Coldfire]

You sure anything changed? The graphics seem to be the same for me xD

[Alexis_Arteme]

I know there's a lot of things that make me not want to play this game, but my office bursting into flames has got to be almost #1.

[Zephir]

You sure anything changed? The graphics seem to be the same for me xD

yeah...light effect change a little...and a little less charge on newer VGA occurs

[Elkwood]

Looks like in Q2 2012 we will get our first major hardware revisions since FFXIV was released. Intel plans to release IvyBridge Chipsets which are 8 Cores running at 3 Ghz on a 22nm platter, also included will be PCIE 3.0, which should increase the throughput from 500mb to 1GB from the video card to the PC, Also included as well is DDR3. analysts are stating that this should be a 30% increase in speed over current hardware.

Also apparently AMD plans to release the Bulldozer chipset near the end of 2011 or the beginning of 2012 which may provide similar performance increases, if not better as it is supposed to be 8/12/16 core processors.

Now if FFXIV runs abundantly laggy on this then idk wtf to do.

[Coldfire]

Well AMD already brings out their octocore 3.6Ghz CPU this fall afaik. And PCIe 2.1 has definately more than 500MB/s... think it was 8GB/s. The 500MB/s is per lane and the GPU slot usually has 16 of those lanes. The Problems with ffxiv come from the crazy high polygon count (no low spec models for faraway objects) and the bad (yes just bad) data loading mechanism.
So I have my doubts a faster CPU or NB will fix this. :/

[Ilean]

Rewriting the engine to use more cores is likely the most difficult thing they could do. Actually on the CPU side they can comfortably let moore's+ law sort performance issues out. GPU they can still do a lot for this game.

[Rimmer]

The game is definately in need of some more optimisations. I just spent a small fortune on building myself a new high spec PC and im still getting some minor hiccups within the game, you'd think a £1600 Custom build PC would run this game flawlessly at max everything on a high resolution, but clearly not.. Looks like im going to have to blow an additional wad of cash getting a second card to SLI and something to cool the damn system.

[DAOWAce]

Whole thing depends....
Also, have you done any double blind tests (that's funny) for frame rates?

I don't think you could pick out the difference between 50-60 FPS and 70-80fps.... at least not with consistency....
My guess is, over a bunch of tests... you'd be 50% correct.... because they'd be just guesses...
Unless you're getting screen tearing from a 60Hz monitor and no triple buffering
99.9% of screens only refresh 60 times a second anyway

Even on my 2004 LCD I can tell the difference between 45 and 60 FPS without having an FPS counter up. Above 60 FPS and it's pretty much impossible, on 60Hz LCDs at least.

If I hook up my CRT and throw it at 100Hz I could probably see differences between 60-80 FPS, but I may need a counter for that, who knows.

For games, I haven't even played SW:The Force Unleashed because it's locked to 30 FPS and the game is so incredibly sluggish it really irritates me.

As for FFXI, I was set on going back due to nostalgia since I finally re-purchased the game with all the expansions; I was just waiting for the time to do so.. until I remembered it's locked to 30 FPS (and the servers were still in Japan), so that killed my will to go back.

I cannot play a game below 45 FPS, I just can't. (although saying that, I played Crysis on an AGP system with an average framerate of 25. Crysis was good at masking problems with low framerates.)

[Zephir]

If you have a costant 45 fps you can play..ploblem is 60-->45/40 drop that probably you (not all people) are able to see.

[Alancode]

I'm running 2GTX 570's and I just played the game at max settings, it was fine out in the world, went to LL and it went from 60 to 20 from 60 to 20, noticed my lights in my room flickering and then looked at my GPU's, both were at 99% usage and 99 degrees. Wtf?