Some performance observations + graphics settings that have an effect

[Tam3n]

Ok so here are some observations I have made while tweaking various settings.

First thing to note is that the this game is very CPU hungry. If your CPU is not up for it, you will get a fps drop for certain! Turning Hyper Threading on/off doesn't have any noticeable effect. When I turned HT off I saw that all four cores were utilized, 1st and 2nd core around 80% and 3rd and 4th around 50%, in the Coerthas city I was doing my tests in. When I turned HT back on the load was distributed in varying degree on all 8 threads.

Also tried to set affinity to only two cores (they were then used 100%) which resulted in a drastic performance drop. So you really want to at least have a quad core processor for this game. My cpu is i7 3820 @ 4,46GHz and 16GB quad channel ram is running at 1938MHz and it still looks like I could make use of some more CPU power!

About hard disk performance, you naturally get faster loading times with a SDD, but it shouldn't affect the fps too much after the zone and characters are loaded. Since I have some ram overhead, I tested running the entire 9GB game from a ram disk. While that effectively reduces the reading times to something very small, it didn't have much of a effect on the actual game performance. That's mostly due to fact that even with a SDD the loading times are mostly just waiting for the server to transfer your character into different zone. Also running from ram didn't have noticeable effect on the fps drops.

The most important graphic settings are the three first in the list.

"HDR rendering" mainly improves rendering of bright objects, mainly the sun. With it you also get a little better colors out of the lighting, but nothing very noticeable most of the time. If your fps is constantly lower than you'd like, try disabling this.

"Occlusion culling" disables rendering of objects you cannot see, freeing resources. Mostly noticeable in cities and other places where a lot geometry is located in the direction of sight (even if most of it is invisible behind walls etc). It doesn't have any effect on the visual quality and I'd always enable this option.

"Use LOD" does what reads in it's description. Distant objects are rendered in a lower detail thus reducing the rendering load. I was a little surprised to see that this option actually nicely decreases the fps drops seen when you turn the camera/move around.

If you still have trouble when there's a lot characters around you, try hiding the shadows of other NPCs.

I have two 7850s in crossfire... If you are playing on a lower end GPU you might need to reduce the other settings further, however these were the settings I found making the biggest impact on the frame rate. Also if you are suffering from a low performance even on the lowest settings on a decent GPU, the bottleneck is then most likely caused by your CPU.

For me the Catalyst 13.8 beta2 drivers have been working nicely.

Looks like enabling/disabling Frame Pacing doesn't have any effect, which is excepted since this is a DX9 game. For now I'd leave it disabled just in case.

Enabling disabling triple buffering doesn't have any effect and I'd leave it disabled.

Using the high quality texture filtering option doesn't have any impact on the fps for me.

Also running firefox-youtube in the background doesn't have any effect on the fps for me.

This game (like any) should run better in the fullwindow mode.

Have you noticed these same things or do you have better info? Please post

[DarkBahamut]

The game is quite CPU demanding, but mainly only when lots of characters are on screen. Disabling physics and shadows improves CPU load for anyone limited here.

The culling feature doesn't make any performance difference for me, but as all video cards feature extensive Z culling in hardware this isn't surprising.

The game engine forces triple buffering (unless you remove the frame limiter) and the AMD setting for this only applies to OpenGL anyway.

[Tam3n]

The game is quite CPU demanding, but mainly only when lots of characters are on screen. Disabling physics and shadows improves CPU load for anyone limited here.

The culling feature doesn't make any performance difference for me, but as all video cards feature extensive Z culling in hardware this isn't surprising.

The game engine forces triple buffering (unless you remove the frame limiter) and the AMD setting for this only applies to OpenGL anyway.

Well, for me enabling occlusion culling does have an effect (according to wikipedia, pre computed visibility zones are used to clip invisible regions)
Also I frankly didn't notice any difference between enabling/disabling physics in either performance or the character animations.

Btw has anyone been able to confirm if the radial blur option actually does something?

[Bizly]

Great advice!

I have two 7850s in crossfire... If you are playing on a lower end GPU you might need to reduce the other settings further, however these were the settings I found making the biggest impact on the frame rate. Also if you are suffering from a low performance even on the lowest settings on a decent GPU, the bottleneck is then most likely caused by your CPU.

For me the Catalyst 13.8 beta2 drivers have been working nicely.

I found that if you don't use the beta drivers with the HD 7850 it makes the game unplayable in almost every setting except bare minimum, however with the beta drivers I was easily able to run maximum @ 60 fps with a single 7850.

[Zakalwe]

Great advice!



I found that if you don't use the beta drivers with the HD 7850 it makes the game unplayable in almost every setting except bare minimum, however with the beta drivers I was easily able to run maximum @ 60 fps with a single 7850.

Yes, I found exactly the same thing. If you read what is different with the current beta drivers, it will say something like 'improved crossfire compatibility with FFXIV:ARR'. Using the current formal release version I found that I was crashing constantly. But with the beta it is pretty smooth and I expect when it goes non-beta it should be even better.

[Ryios]

CPU: i5-2500k (OC 4.8ghz)
GPU: Evga Nvidia GTX 760
Resolution: 2560X1440

With my setup above, I find my GPU to be my bottleneck, I need another one for SLI and I won't have any issues, but until then, I average 45+ fps in most areas on High Desktop settings with most of what you've listed set and it runs well for me. I have max view distance too.

Sitting on top of the tower in Carthaes Highlands and being able to see people running around on chocobos a mile away is probably about one of the most beautiful in game views I've ever seen in any game to date.

[Trikki]

CPU: i5-2500k (OC 4.8ghz)
GPU: Evga Nvidia GTX 760
Resolution: 2560X1440

With my setup above, I find my GPU to be my bottleneck, I need another one for SLI and I won't have any issues, but until then, I average 45+ fps in most areas on High Desktop settings with most of what you've listed set and it runs well for me. I have max view distance too.

This game at 2560x1440 is very gpu heavy. I run the same cpu and a gtx 780 and it drops to 45-50 at times @ 2560x1440.

[Doki]

There are very few games that utilize hyperthreading. In theory, you should see comparable benchmarks i5 vs i7, maybe off by 1k or less depending on background applications running. The performance increase jumping to SLI for single monitor is not that great to be honest. SLI isn't really worth it unless you are running multiple monitors. Even then, a single GTX 680 is going to run the game fine at max settings. The visual improvement bumping up to 2560x1440 is pretty nice, but I may switch to 2 1920x1080 monitors soon. I've done triple screen gaming in the past and for a game like this it's a vast improvement. Chat windows, map and other UI junk really eat up the screen real estate and you don't see a lot of the really pretty stuff in-game going on behind it all.

[Verlande_Darquandier]

7970ghz@ 1150mhz wich actually is one of the most powerfull gpu (only gtx780 and Titan are better) and game still have perf issues, btw game is running perfect at maximum when there is not many people around.
I think we need drivers, we got to wait, AMD is collaborating with SE.

[nasomi]

Currently there are problems with SLI and multi-monitor, you take a big hit on performance.

I have 2 gtx580's in SLI and 3 monitors giving me 5760x1200 game resolution. In 1.0 I could run max settings like this, but now I have to resort to low laptop settings, which is definitely not as it should be. The game doesn't look bad, but it definitely could look better. Also affects the draw distance as well. A single gtx580 runs the game at max on a single 1920x1200 monitor at 60fps and 80% gpu usage. On max with SLI enabled for nvidia surround, I get 10fps at most, if I go around water, 1fps and I can't move.

I have an intel i7 950, and at most I see 15-20% cpu usage, so I'm pretty pleased with that performance. I even have it set to use CPU for physics. However, my Q6600 sees 80-90% cpu usage for basic settings with a gtx 280, so making the step to the i7 series makes a huge difference.