HD2600XT

[Talis]

I built a new machine recently (athalon 64 X2 6000+, 2 gig ram yada yada) and stuck a HD2600XT in it mainly due to the cost, and the assumption that it should be fine to play FFXI.

For the most part it works fine, gets a bit laggy with lots of PCs on screen (shadows on it drops to around 18-20fps in whitegate). I'm trying to oversample the background res to 1680x1680 to at least match native res on my screen. The big problem I'm having is every time I hit a light flare (eg those glowing patches in the crawlers nest, Ghrah in sea etc) the framerate just totally bottoms out, I usually drop down to about 6-8fps. CPU utilization still hovers around 30-40% max even when framerate drops out. I've tried going back to 1024x1024 background with no luck, and played with a few different driver sets.

Has anyone found a set of drivers that works well with this card? Or is it in the end just a piece of crap?

[levish]

try turning off shadows and/or weather and seeing if that fixes your problem.

The way ffxi is made can only ever get so good lag wise.

[Reality]

videocard isn't the problem

granted, 2600XT isn't a great card, it's still leaps and bounds ahead of what FFXI requires to run, any shortcomings in framerates you are getting are purely software-limited based on the way this game was PORTED from the PS2, to PC.

</3 ports