High end computer getting low FPS in city.

[samfisher]

Wrong. The game barely uses more than one CPU core. If you have a Hyperthreaded i7, you'll never see the CPU meter go above 12.5% on the ffxiv process because it simply doesn't use the other cores at the same time. Albeit I'll give them credit for not being horrible about it. Other games I played also top out one cpu core, and completely screw up rendering the second any lag is encountered.



You can't ever guarantee a SLI/Crossfire setup will work, as most peoples systems do not actually have the bandwidth required to utilize the second video card (SLI usually takes a x16 and a x4 and switches them into x8 and x8 mode) without crippling the first one. If the game is being limited by the PCIe lanes, then the Crossfire setup will not be any better.

You actually need a very expensive computer rig to use two,three or four GPU's at maximum speed, by which by that time you're probably spent 600$ per video card and 2000$ on the CPU's. Trust me it's overkill.

If the game achieves 30fps@1920x1080, then the game is operating as intended. If you get more, than you have a nice video card.

As for FPS dropping in cities and in fields/FATE's, yes it does happen a bit, and this happens in other MMO's as well, it's usually not the video card but part of the networking code being in the rendering loop that results in the problem.

If it barely uses one core, that one core should be pretty high up in usage, not middling as it is now.

SLI/Crossfire does NOT need x16 PCIE3 for full bandwidth. You can go all the way down to x4 3.0 with barely any difference. Pump it up to 3-GPUs then you might need x8. There's nothing that saturates x16 PCIE3 yet.

I am no expert in such matters...but perhaps this is neither caused by GPU CPU nor RAM, but the usual suspect: Harddisk read writes.
Again, I am not really sure, just speculating:
Everytime when you go into a town, certainly all the static models (such as buildings, NPC, etc) are already pre-loaded into memory during the loading screen. However, this does not apply to players, for a simple reason: no way to predict who will suddenly pops in your screen in an MMO.

Most likely, the FPS loss in city is due to many players going in and out of your "range" at all times, and the PC is reading HDD for all kinds of model, texture and animations (character, hair, weapon, outfit, pets, you name it...).

My "prove" of this:
In Old Gridania, try to approach the market place from the Lancer's Guild.
Around Lancer's Guild, not much people, FPS is smooth.
Run towards market place at the south, start to get stuttering, but press onwards.
Once your "range" covers the majority of market place, majority of the other players are already loaded, the FPS climbs back up again.

If all character models and outfits are pre-loaded into memory, then perhaps with very good GPU CPU & RAM, the FPS will always be high.
But obviously, this is not the case in MMORPG.

I believe there's a way to achieve smooth FPS in cities, through RAM Disk.
What RAM Disk does: loads all the game files into RAM, so that whenever some file is needed, it will search RAM instead of HDD.
So if someone with over 16GB RAM tries out RAM Disk and share the result, perhaps we will know if HDD is truly the bottleneck.

I'm on an SSD Still lags. Also AMD drivers are totally crap.