Calling All Computer Gurus! - Some Assistance

[Rawrrior]

I hate FPS drops.. Really do. I like playing as close to max settings as i can, but with this game, i'm limited to standard for desktop.

I have a AMD 6950 2gb twin frozr II (i think) graphics card, bought it about a year, maybe a little more, ago. It pains me that such an expensive card at that time, can't run this on max. Really annoys me when i notice a big drop of frames in a lot of areas..

I also have a AMD FX-8350 4.0GHz 8 core processor
16GB of DDR3 ram
I think (i say i think cause i'm not home) 750W PSU
I think a gigabyte 779(?) motherboard? I don't know i can't remember for the life of me.

I would THINK my rig would handle this no problem. So question i have.. Is my graphics card holding me back? SEs recommended card for this is a 7950!

Seeing how i also read and heard from others that they will up the graphics once the ps4 is out, i'm even more terrified D:!

any insight is greatly appreciated! Thanks!

[Colyo]

Upgrade your processor. E8500's are way way way outdated for today's gaming standards.

Newegg can land you an i5 2500k for around 200$ if you're in canada/US. That'll last you for a long time yet.

[Astralen]

Hi.

First of all, your CPU could very well be bottlenecking your 760.

Second of all, everyone playing at hight settings should notice a FPS drop in fates, cities, raids or any other area containing many Player Characters (PCs). This is not something exclusive to FFXIV but is quite common in most MMOs, especially with beautiful graphics like this one.

For example, if I stand in the middle of Revenant's Toll I get around 30-35fps but if I go to the area where the farmers are my FPS jumps up to 60fps where I want it to be (I'm using Vsync). I don't think any computer can give you 60fps across the board. I got 17k on my FFXIV benchmark using a 3750k @ 4.4GHz, GTX680 SLI and 12GB RAM.

All MMOs are very CPU intensive and overclocking yours (or preferably your new one) would be highly recommended.

[nasomi]

Your cpu is a serious bottleneck for high resolutions, but I'd be looking at your hard drive. Whenever you turn the camera, you are loading all new stuff, which the hdd has to seek out and find hte files for and load.

I used to play on an intel q6600 quad core, really awesome processor with a gtx280 and 6gb ram. My GPU was my bottleneck. When I upgraded to the gtx580, bam, my cpu usage shot to the roof, because the gpu was no longer the bottleneck. When I upgraded to an i7 950, bam, ram issue, hten hard drive issue. Now I'm at 2 gtx580's in SLI, 12gb ram, and i7 950 and 2 high end SSD's, and hte GPU's are the bottleneck again.

Try limiting your fps to 30, that helped me in the past.

[Trancery]

Thanks for all the responses guys (even the ones about the cpu speeds and whether or not the game optimizes more than one cpu core was very interesting to read)

I would have to say that from what I'm gathering, my cpu is definitely bottle-necking the performance of my new Graphics Card.

Also, I only have one HD and FFXIV is installed on the same partition as Windows 7.

Should I definitely consider upgrading my mobo, cpu, ram, and getting a separate Hard Drive for games so everything loads faster?

"Put your computer in DMZ state? What is that?

And please don't get me started on Revanent's Toll. I get maybe 15-20FPS at best there. Also, people load very late while I'm just standing at the Atheryte

Thanks again!

[Trancery]

I'm thinking about getting an SSD and installing FFXIV on that. Would that be of advantage? Having one dedicated SSD for games and the old mechanical for Windows 7?

[ZohnoReecho]

you can put everything on ssd and move data you wanna keep safe on another hdd. the os doesn't use the disk much and you'll gain boot speed.

[worldofneil]

I'm thinking about getting an SSD and installing FFXIV on that. Would that be of advantage? Having one dedicated SSD for games and the old mechanical for Windows 7?

Ideally both on SSD would be best, but not always an option! So if you have an SSD you're better off having your operating system on the SSD (as that read/writes data very frequently - especially the pagefile!) and games on the mechanical (you can check process monitor and with FFXIV aside from loading areas, it doesn't really do a lot of disk activity so although an SSD would decrease load time somewhat, it'd be kinda wasted if that was the only reason).

[nasomi]

If you look how it's structured, the game relies on THOUSANDS of tiny unrelated bits of data, each character model, spell effect, etc, called at random as you encounter them in the game. mechanical drives suffer not because of the read speed, but the random read speed. It has to swing the arm over and spin the disc to the correct lcoation for each bit of data it tries to read. You're encountering hundreds of elements in the world, and milliseconds become more like seconds, and it's really noticeable. With SSD's the seek time is significantly reduced because it doesn't have to swing the arm and platter around. A 60gb ssd can be had for $30-40, I'd reccomend giving it a shot as it's the cheapest to upgrade in your system. YOu can use it for game only, since the os isn't regularly accessed, so you can get by with a smaller capacity drive.

[Trancery]

Ok I think I am going to get a SSD to install Windows 7 and ffxiv arr onto. I was thinking this one as it looks pretty good and I can afford it:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820239045

I wanted to make sure it will work with my current Motherboard as I do not have the funds to upgrade that yet:

http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/P5Q_PRO/

Thanks for all the advice guys; It's awesome how pro you all are!