A word from IGN.com

[Abriael]

To be fair, there's a reason for this. Not only is there astronomically more variation in gear, but Aion also has to send you roughly 5x as much information per character due to its level of character creation detail.

That has basically no bearing on graphical lag. Graphical lag mostly depends on the number of polygons on screen, the resolution of textures, effects and so forth.

variation in gear and information per character puts more stress mainly on memory, not on the video card, and memory is very, very marginal for graphics.

The simple fact is that ALL mmorpgs run considerably slower than single player games on the same hardware and comparable detail, because the amount of detailed characters displayed is on a whole different level.

FFXIV is the only MMORPG out there that runs on engine settings that aren't equivalent to a 4-6 years old single player game, and that's why it requires better hardware to run. Still nowhere near "the best" or "insanely powerful".

Dont know what kind of computer you're running

AMD Phenom II X4 965, 4 gigs of ram, GTX 460. Nowhere a "insanely powerful" PC.

As usual, can't spell IGNorant without IGN.

I just think SE should pay some attention to what media is saying about their game. Also I think it's a bit unfair to lump ign as one of "bad critics who just want to dump on XIV" as their review of XIV is the 9th highest score out there.

They should pay some attention when the "media" isn't writing a load of bullcrap coming from some random jock that quite obviously didn't even play the game, or played it so little that he didn't even get the slightest idea of the basic systems. I remember checking the lodestone page of the guy that reviewed the game for IGN and having a laugh, he was level 12 in a single class, and didn't even *try* the armory system.

The ability to write valid criticism comes with experience. No experience = invalid criticism. It's simple.