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  1. #1
    Requiescat in pace.
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    Video Card

    looking at upgrading my video card to fix these 7 fps issues and settled on something like this http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814127726

    Anyone have any issues with this card/chipset? I know ffxi is finnicky about these things.


    P.S. This RQTless BG is offputting, feels like i'm gonna get banhammered as soon as I post this >_>

  2. #2
    Relic Horn
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    That video card should work fine as far as the future of ffxi the outlook does not look good...

  3. #3
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    any card SHOULD be fine, but when it comes to ffxi things don't always work the way they should.

  4. #4
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    I've also been looking at buying a new video card for a couple of weeks now, and the ability to run FFXI is definitely a deciding factor in what I'll pick up, but I've heard horror stories about FFXI and certain cards (nVidia appears to be the main culprit) so knowing what to get is challenging.

    Is there any way to discern which chipsets FFXI will play nice with without having to make too many sacrifices to newer titles? I'd personally be happy with a simple "xxxx-range are good, ffxi and battlefield both work great" kind of response.

  5. #5
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    Quote Originally Posted by KCem View Post
    I've also been looking at buying a new video card for a couple of weeks now, and the ability to run FFXI is definitely a deciding factor in what I'll pick up, but I've heard horror stories about FFXI and certain cards (nVidia appears to be the main culprit) so knowing what to get is challenging.

    Is there any way to discern which chipsets FFXI will play nice with without having to make too many sacrifices to newer titles? I'd personally be happy with a simple "xxxx-range are good, ffxi and battlefield both work great" kind of response.
    There is an approved/tested and what drivers work section on the playonline website from SE. It's always worked fairly well for me.

  6. #6
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    My understanding is FFXI does most of its processing on the CPU so getting a better video card shouldn't really do much at all. Remeber the minimum requirements for FFXI are 32MB of VRAM lol....What you want is a CPU that is at least 3GHz. I've found playing on laptops with CPUs slower then that tends to suck when dual/tri boxing.

  7. #7
    Melee Summoner
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    The game itself uses almost no CPU. All the load is in the video drivers, since they have to translate the ancient dialect of scrambled mess the game sends it (D3D7 compatibility calls) into something the GPU can use. I had recently upgraded from a GTX280 to a GTX780, and there was 0 performance improvement !

  8. #8
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    Quote Originally Posted by Heatsink View Post
    The game itself uses almost no CPU.
    Unless it's due to DirectX API overhead, XI loves to use up a full core on my laptop in alliance content.

  9. #9
    Melee Summoner
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    I used a profiler to check it, but you can tell without one if you use the task manager's 'show kernel times' while restricting the game to 1 processor (separate graph per processor).

  10. #10
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    "All the load is in the video drivers"? Well, video drivers need some kind of hardware to execute on, so in any case where they're not using the GPU, then they're using the CPU to do the work. So if there is a lot of work that the GPU doesn't handle, as you assert, then the game cannot be using "almost no CPU".

  11. #11
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    Well, the idea is that it's possible for someone besides SE to significantly improve the game's performance. This was done once before by nvidia when ffxi was getting 4 to 5 fps on their Fermi-series cards: driver revision 266.35 increased framerate by over 10X on those cards, and nearly doubled performance on pre-fermi cards. I wouldn't be surpised if with some effort nvidia could double the performance again. It took a tremendous outcry for nvidia to do that, though.

  12. #12
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    There's also the simple idea that XI's engine is god damn ancient, and that SE has had a good chunk of the decade to add in proper DX9 support, particularly given WinXP support is officially dead in 8 months. Hell, I bet FFXI would still work on Windows 98 because of how little has changed.

    Instead they're off dicking about with a new UI that's going to need a hell of a lot of work with its current test server state, and probably won't be all that fluid to begin with courtesy of the capped 30fps.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Kaisha View Post
    Instead they're off dicking about with a new UI that's going to need a hell of a lot of work with its current test server state, and probably won't be all that fluid to begin with courtesy of the capped 30fps.
    Even when you uncap the FPS, iirc SE's animations require a power of two scaling factor from 30fps. So they either run at 60fps, 30fps, 15 fps, etc. If you're uncapped to 60 fps and whitegate forces your computer down to 35 fps, all the animations (like NPC dialog scrolling) takes almost twice as long as normal. Even on new computers that otherwise play well with FFXI and never drop below 30fps, seeing 45fps in heavy action, whitegate, etc. is pretty common.

    They'd need to do more than just uncap it in order to make it work.

  14. #14
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    It did work on windows 98 when I tried it last year! As far as uncapping, with my 5GHz sandy bridge & gtx280 system, I never drop below 60fps with 50 chars onscreen and mid shadows (with windows XP). Even with all that power, I still need to turn off shadows and non-party effects at a packed reive battle to maintain 60. It would be really great if SE did some work on the engine, but I gave up hope once I saw Microsoft still supporting pre-D3D9 APIs in windows 8.

  15. #15
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    Quote Originally Posted by Kaisha View Post
    There's also the simple idea that XI's engine is god damn ancient, and that SE has had a good chunk of the decade to add in proper DX9 support, particularly given WinXP support is officially dead in 8 months.
    Official support may be ending, but many people are going to continue using XP, and that will include members of their Japanese playerbase that actually don't still play on PS2.

  16. #16
    Requiescat in pace.
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    So bottom line it for me: new video card won't solve my problem?

  17. #17
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    Quote Originally Posted by grevenilvec75 View Post
    So bottom line it for me: new video card won't solve my problem?
    This isn't necessarily true, and I'm going to clear up some of the misconceptions in this thread.

    For starters, FFXI doesn't entirely unload itself onto the CPU. In fact, for those of you who don't remember or didn't know this, FFXI was the FFXIV 1.0 of its time—that is, plenty of computers couldn't run it, as it required hardware T&L (transform and lighting), which had only existed in DirectX after 1999. Additionally, T&L didn't become standard in chipsets until 2001. Because of these factors, a lot of games of the time either didn't use T&L at all, or provided it as an option—FFXI, on the other hand, would not run without it.

    All of the aforementioned is relevant because hardware T&L specifically requires a graphic chipset for operation, hence the "hardware" part. It was designed to unload a lot of the geometry processing—specifically related to transform and lighting, as you may have guessed—onto the chipset, whereas other games of the time relied about entirely on the CPU. Considering, FFXI was specifically designed to not strictly use the CPU, while other games of the time were. I believe this may be why people say that FFXI relies entirely on the CPU, as that was the common industry knowledge at the time, but FFXI's developers were forward-thinking (and therefore risk-taking) in terms of choosing the technology that their game required, so that assertion is wrong.

    Now, we'll return to modern matters: why this is or isn't relevant in relation to newer cards. Well, for starters, newer cards have loads of new features, like shaders and what not, but none of these matter to FFXI, because it doesn't use any of them. It was made before they existed. Since T&L has existed for over a decade now, and is standard, every card is guaranteed to work with FFXI, but exclusively optimizing T&L functionality is no longer the focus of the manufacturers. Additionally, guaranteeing excellent compatibility with older DirectX functions is not the modern GPU manufacturer's concern. They want things to work with DirectX 10 and 11, and to some extent 9, but anything preceding that is comparatively unimportant. While they may cover it in their testing, they won't be optimizing for it.

    This impacts FFXI because it uses DirectX 7 and 8. The former, DirectX 7, is why FFXI does not support anti-aliasing. DirectX 7 and 8 have already passed their end-of-life thresholds with Microsoft, and there are plenty of software developers and hardware manufacturers who—for the sake of efficiency—do not support anything that has reached its end-of-life. As such, buying a newer graphics card with the expectation of improving your performance in FFXI is always going to be a crap-shoot.

    EDIT: I belatedly realized that I concluded this post without a suggestion, so here it is: if you haven't already done so, you should purchase an SSD, and run FFXI off of that. It provides a significant and immediate improvement due to how FFXI locally loads information from its DATs. Beyond that, there's the usual recommendations: check your Windower enhancement settings; turn off weather and shadows; limit the amount of models on-screen, and so on.

  18. #18
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    Quote Originally Posted by Heatsink View Post
    As far as uncapping, with my 5GHz sandy bridge & gtx280 system, I never drop below 60fps
    How do you remove the 29.x fps cap?

  19. #19
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    There was a 3P program that edited the right location in memory on FFEvo a while back, but I don't see it anymore. When they added the 15 FPS cap to fishing, they added a location in memory where the FPS cap is stored. Obviously their intent is to normally leave it at 30 FPS and adjust it downwards for fishing, but you can also adjust it upwards, which is what this program did.

  20. #20
    Requiescat in pace.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Kohan View Post
    EDIT: I belatedly realized that I concluded this post without a suggestion, so here it is: if you haven't already done so, you should purchase an SSD, and run FFXI off of that. It provides a significant and immediate improvement due to how FFXI locally loads information from its DATs. Beyond that, there's the usual recommendations: check your Windower enhancement settings; turn off weather and shadows; limit the amount of models on-screen, and so on.

    I already have everything I can think of turned off. I also reduced the game resolution from 1600x900 to 1024xwhatever and it didnt help at all. I'm running a 2.3ghz quad core CPU and a radeon HD 4600 card. It's a solid computer, but is a few years old. I've had these FPS issues forever but they never really mattered until I had to start stunning in delve.

    SSD is probably a non-option until I build a new computer.

    This computer can run Skyrim and Deus Ex: Human Revolution just fine.

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