Calling All Computer Gurus! - Some Assistance

[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.