Why does FFXI lag no matter what I do?

[Belgaer]

I'm running on a pretty decent laptop. I've got 8GB RAM, 2.3 gHZ dual core (AMD), and 3GB RAM video card (ATI). I'm on Windows 7, with my battery profile set to High Performance (tweaked it to give completely uncapped performance settings too).

And yet my FPS still drops a full 15 points when I add shadows, weather effects, etc., and drops much further when I turn Effects of Party members or Alliance Members on.


I don't understand it. Like I said, I can run Oblivion on max settings (aside from resolution anyway) with less lag than I can FFXI on middling settings.



Oh, and one last thing is that my CPU and RAM never spike much higher than 25%~ usage.

[Maguspk]

It's old technology, it could be anywhere from an incompatibility with your hardware/software setup, to poor coding on the part of SE during development. Either way, the ultimate problem is that it's a fucking old game.

[Belgaer]

Lol. So it's going to lag no matter what?

[Anomander]

Try to play around with different drivers. Like the other person said, its an old game, and incompatibilities will appear. I personally had a very odd issue after upgrading my pc to windows 7 (with a reformat). The drivers windows installed for my graphics card created a very strange issue with the game where it would use way more ram than usual in the task manager. When I upgraded my graphics drivers, poof the problem disappeared.

[Pikarya]

Even Everquest has issues with newer technology. Its to be expected, especially since XI is nearing 8 years old, and was horrifically wrote in spaghetti code.

Also the team very, very rarely seems to work with hardware manufacturers anymore for bug/performance/optimization testing. I mean the last time SE actually bothered to check what cards/drivers were "working optimal" was during the 9 series (Nvidia) & 3xxx series (ATI).

Your just going to have to fiddle around and try different settings, drivers, and everything of the sort. I've seen XI run better on 1xxx/4xxx series than any of the newer cards out. (Primarily because they use older drivers, mostly legacy now).

Processor means little to nothing these days, considering FFXI runs on one core. 2-4GB of Memory is more than enough for the game in general.

Anyways good luck, it sucks but thats "how it is".

[Olo401]

It's probably a combination of the video driver issue, bad code, and the fact that laptop CPUs and GPUs are specifically designed to run at low power, and therefore run MUCH slower than their desktop cousins. I'm also sure that DirectX performance plays a really big part since XI uses at least three different levels at once to render (7/8/9.0c).

[xopher]

The game was developed on PS2 and then ported to PC.

The game will never know how to use CPU and GPU efficiently.

Also what you're referring to is not lag, it's low FPS. Lag is a delay between input and receipt of input.

[BorkBorkBork]

Double check your driver is up to date or maybe try to use an older one. My kid has a couple year old Toshiba laptop. Used to run fine, then they updated their drivers and ran like crap. Recently updated with new driver release and it runs fine now.