Calling All Computer Gurus! - Some Assistance

[Trancery]

Hey everyone, first off, thanks for taking the time to read this post. I am in desperate need of assistance and would love to know what the problem is or / if it can be solved?

I consider my computer (and especially the new Graphics Card I picked up) to be pretty good. I also did the FFXIV ARR benchmark and got a 8700 on MAX resolution / MAX settings. However, most of the time my FPS drops constantly when going into a camp, or swiveling the camera, etc. or joining a FATE, to 20 and below. I tend to have 0 to very little issues with my Framerate in dungeons or instanced battles.

Here are my specs:

- Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit
- Power Supply 750W
- Intel Dual Core E8500 @ 3.18GHZ
- EVGA SuperClocked 02G-P4-2765-KR GeForce GTX 760 2GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 SLI Support w/ EVGA ACX Cooler Video Card
- 8GB DDR2 RAM
- P5Q-PRO Motherboard
- 20mb/s internet connection

Here is a list of everything I have tried so far:

I've updated to the latest drivers on motherboard and graphics card
I cleaned out the entire inside of the pc and made sure everything was installed correctly
the voltage connectors going to Graphics card are 6 pin and 8 pin both connected correctly.

I honestly have no idea what to do. I was hoping some of you might have some suggestions because I'd love to be able to play this game on Very High settings (not even maximum) with the FPS at a constant 40.

Maybe it is just the game right now but it really gets to be a problem when I'm playing sometimes. Also, a lot of the time characters or objects tend not to load until after 20 secs of me standing there, is that normal?

Thanks in advance for any help that you guys can offer!

- BB

[Maza]

It sounds like you are having maybe some lag issues like well over 1000 other people on these forums? Thats why I'm here lol, nice comp, never had any problems with any online games till now, rubberbanding and lagging. Like you said, when you turn the view angle n such.

[Velev]

Yeah as Maza said, sounds like a lag issue to me, which many of us get. However for some games i normally turn my AA off from the GFX card properties since it sometimes causes more issues than helps.

Try it i guess.. you have nothing to lose and if that doesn't do it, i'm sure someone else will give you another idea to try.

Or it could be a hardware issue rather than software.

Hope it works out for you.

[KisaiTenshi]

With that configuration your only options are to either clock down the video card a bit (some people have said this has evened-out frame rate) but really the game really only makes use of one CPU core, and your CPU is in fine. The video card depends on the driver and settings that override the game's settings.

I have a much weaker card currently, and the frame rate drops noticeably around very large FATE groups (30 people or so) and large areas of water. The latter is because HDR is computationally expensive. The former is something that every MMO game in existence does.

[Trancery]

Thanks for the comments / suggestions guys. I have turned off my AA under the Nvidia settings and will see what that does.

One of you mentioned underclocking my gpu? how do i go about doing that?

Thanks!

[Gonzothegreat198]

With that configuration your only options are to either clock down the video card a bit (some people have said this has evened-out frame rate) but really the game really only makes use of one CPU core, and your CPU is in fine. The video card depends on the driver and settings that override the game's settings.

I have a much weaker card currently, and the frame rate drops noticeably around very large FATE groups (30 people or so) and large areas of water. The latter is because HDR is computationally expensive. The former is something that every MMO game in existence does.

Where do you see that it only uses one core? I would think that if the recommended specs call for an i5 then it at least uses 2 cores. I know on my E6600 the game runs, but I have to turn the process to high and even then running anything else is a chore.

Another thing I'm seeing is that based on the minimum spec of a Dual Core that this game most definitely utilizes at least 2 cores. One article I was reading about 1.0 showed that FFXVI 1.0 only used 4 out of 8 threads on an i7 cpu. Thats still at the very least 2 cores. If FFXIV 1.0 ran utilizing at least 2 cores, how can you say 2.0 only utilizes one?

[KisaiTenshi]

Where do you see that it only uses one core? I would think that if the recommended specs call for an i5 then it at least uses 2 cores. I know on my E6600 the game runs, but I have to turn the process to high and even then running anything else is a chore.

Another thing I'm seeing is that based on the minimum spec of a Dual Core that this game most definitely utilizes at least 2 cores. One article I was reading about 1.0 showed that FFXVI 1.0 only used 4 out of 8 threads on an i7 cpu. Thats still at the very least 2 cores. If FFXIV 1.0 ran utilizing at least 2 cores, how can you say 2.0 only utilizes one?

Because if you tick the "lock FPS to 30" box you will see it only use %CPU equal to one core. It's not using all 4 (or 8 hyperthreaded) cores, it's using one core for just about everything, and very little winds up on a second core. My guess is this has more to do with keeping a consistant code base with the PS3 version and we'll have to wait for a DX11/64-bit version before the rest of the cores get much use.

When watching the CPU meters, I've noticed the only time "more than one CPU" has really been engaged, it's when disk activity is involved. At most I've seen 5 cores in use, all around 50% during a loading scene. The rest of the time it's 9-13% and stays there. That's one core on a i7 quadcore.

A dual core system will have trouble with FFXIV, not because of the game, but because of any resident processes (Windows Indexing service, Windows Update, Antivirus, etc) that also monopolize one core while they operate. You can lock FFXIV to a single core with the task manager, and you'll see almost no performance impact.

[Raist]

Disabling shadows can have a profound impact for some as well--disable cascading shadows and hide them for self, others, etc.

[Trancery]

Well I have tried disabling AA and turning down shadows. Helps a little but not much of a difference with flipping camera around / running into FATE's / cities. Maybe i need to get a new HD and CPU too? Seems to be what is missing from my system...

Any other suggestions? I really would like to enjoy this game on a higher graphics / smoother performance.

Thanks

[Freyar]

Usually something like that is an inidcator that something is choking loading. Do you have the game running on the same physical hard disk as your OS or any other application that may be reading/writing to it heavily?

I noticed you wrote that your RAM is DDR2, it could also be a point of issue as well.