Increasing FPS on FFXI

[Antithesis]

I've looked around for information on this and I really can't figure it out. Usually, im running around 11-19 FPS in places like Whitegate, Mog house around 25-27 FPS. I have about 898 RAM on my PC and have an AMD Antholon Proccesor with about 2.3. If anyone can give me some advice on how to increase my FPS I'd greatly appreciate it. If this is not in the proper forum please feel free to move it.

[fantasticdan]

Do you already have shadows and weather effects turned off?

[Antithesis]

Do you already have shadows and weather effects turned off?

Yes

[Phla]

doesn't fps in game cap at 29, i thought i read somewhere it did :/ thats what i always used to get on a system similar to yours so it never seemed that far fetched to me. maybe you should try lowering the amount of players shown on your screen, as that also gave me a decent increase in frame speed through towns and etc.

[Antithesis]

I have done everything to get as high FPS as possible. Lowered characters on screen, shadows gone, weather effects gone, etc. And yeah game caps at 29 FPS because if you hit 30 or more apparently the Auto Jailers kicks and and your screwed.

[drwaffles]

What video card do you use? And are you on Vista?

[Antithesis]

ATI Radeon Xpress 200. Windows XP.

[Auspice]

1) Turn off bump mapping
2) Lower your 3D and background resolution
3) ???
4) Profit

[drwaffles]

I assume you're also using a fairly low background resolution?

[bungiefan]

I tried all this earlier. I'm on a Radeon 9600 Pro with a 3 Ghz Pentium 4 HT and 3 GB of RAM. I set my game to 640x480 overlay with 256x256 background resolution, all textures compressed, all effects filtered in-game, footsteps and shadows off, weather off, and anything else I could think of, and was still getting 6-8 FPS in the Mammet fight for CoP 2-5, and the entire trip through Riverne Site A. It runs effectively the same at 512x512 background and 1024x768 overlay, without effects filtered. I've tried multiple driver versions, and the only one that even gets that many FPS is the one SE's representative told me to use, from April of 2005.

[Ruzaki]

I'll have to turn on FPS display next time I'm in campaign. Anyone notice that sometimes the fps goes through the roof? Seen it happen a lot in Fort K-N and Sauro. Looks far too smooth to be 29 or lower...

[drwaffles]

Honestly, whether or not your PC can run FFXI at capped FPS in most places is largely luck of the draw. I know several people with older, less powerful computers than mine who have no trouble with visual lag at all whilst I have to actively keep people out of my camera's view in order to maintain 29 FPS in areas with more than 8 characters or lots of mobs present. NPCs in places like Campaign or even Norg simply destroy my FPS too.

[Karinastar]

It's my understanding that it's just a badly coded game that runs almost entirely on the processor. My PC seems to get the same FPS regardless of background resolution etc. The only thing that helps me is turning shadows off and lowering the number of character models onscreen. If it's just me and a few other people, no matter where I am or what weather it is, or what abilities we're using etc I'm capped at 29 FPS (my PC is a Core 2 Quad 2.4ghz). It seems to be entirely dependent on the number of models onscreen. I wonder if it has something to do with FFXI being capped at 56k? I don't see how that'd effect FPS though, but my friend suggested it.

Do you run much else in the background? You might want to close all the processes you can, especially ones that are using any of the processor at all. That helped me on my old Pentium 4 that wasn't much faster than your machine.

[Antithesis]

Just usually Ventrilo, Aim, AVG and Firefox.

[The Stig]

I too ponder about the CPU as well.

I used to play on a P4 3.0ghz with 512mb RAM and Radeon 9600, and FPS is similar to how bungiefan and Antithesis described. This was in Windows XP with around 14 processes running, 15 including FFXI (I super tweaked the machine)

But them, having moved on to a Core 2 Duo rated at 2.0ghz and 2gb RAM with a similar weak graphics card, performance is really good in XP and Vista too, the only thing that lags me up are BRD songs in Vista. XP = flawless.

I know people say it's an intensive game, but I am beginning to wonder how intensive. I know the game does not have multi-core support. What always boggles my mind is that if i look at the task manager where it shows you which core is doing what, FFXI takes up the CPU most of the time and both cores show that something is going on in both cores.

I really have no clue how exactly the internals are worked out but if I turn off FFXI and leave the machine idle then both cores drop to minimal/no activity.

i'm not sure how the load is distributed.

[Asami]

I had this very same problem and managed to fix it after going through many computer parts. First off, 8000Series Nvidia+Vista causes more than a couple people on screen to just drop FPS to hell like that. There seems to have been a batch of Nvidia, and possibly a batch of ATI that just "Forgot" to put some kind of hardware for DX8 on them, so Vista is emulating it, and very poorly. GPU model #'s with #6## or #6#(i.e. 9600 or 260) are not designed with gamers in mind(Sure marketing does what they want but, yeah). Stick with 8's and 9's(i.e. 9800 295)

Secondly, if you're not having the glitch from a faulty GPU, then it all comes down to the CPU like Karinastar said. I have a Core 2 Quad @ 3.2Ghz 1600FSB and my FPS only drops a tiny bit when 50 people are on screen in the middle of an intense Dynamis now. Usually always 29.4(Even in the middle of Whitegate). Yeah, after 7 years, there are finally some processors that can run FFXI acceptably well(Still shadows will cause lag with lots of people). I'm running 1440x900 & 2880x1800 res in game(I read that it can't go higher than 2000ish but I get edges on textures if it's not set to double 1440 so...)

--Multi-Core-- I don't know if it was a POL update or a Windows Hotfix but for some time now my FFXI has been using all 4 cores. I know because for a while it would always run on one core at 30~100% and then one day, all of a sudden, it has all 4 cores @ 5~30%(Depends on how many people are on the screen) each pretty evenly. If I turn shadows on with 50~ people around, all 4 go nutty. So it is most definitely using multiple cores now. How, when, why, exactly, I'm not sure though(You would think SE would announce it they had a hand in it).

Hope that helps, Focus on your CPU. GPU is not going to "Help" you in FFXI, it can only hinder you at this point. Hence the people saying it's hit or miss. Just stay away from the models that are known to be problematic(And get a monster CPU).

[drwaffles]

It's my understanding that it's just a badly coded game that runs almost entirely on the processor. My PC seems to get the same FPS regardless of background resolution etc. The only thing that helps me is turning shadows off and lowering the number of character models onscreen. If it's just me and a few other people, no matter where I am or what weather it is, or what abilities we're using etc I'm capped at 29 FPS (my PC is a Core 2 Quad 2.4ghz). It seems to be entirely dependent on the number of models onscreen. I wonder if it has something to do with FFXI being capped at 56k? I don't see how that'd effect FPS though, but my friend suggested it.

Do you run much else in the background? You might want to close all the processes you can, especially ones that are using any of the processor at all. That helped me on my old Pentium 4 that wasn't much faster than your machine.

We have exactly the same processor specs, and you just described my performance exactly. I can turn the background res up to more than double the foreground, turn on full settings, max drawdistance and so on and still hit 29.4 FPS in places where I'm alone or with just a couple of other characters/NPCs on-screen, even in zones where the extra drawdistance reveals an enormous amount of extra textures to be rendered. But running 640x640 (with all my settings turned off) I'm fucked as soon as I'm dealing with more than a 6-man party. Weather, avatars and telepoints aren't an issue, although BRD songs (Ballad especially) are.

What video card are you using, out of interest?

[Colenzo]

your FPS is high enough stop whining

[drwaffles]

your FPS is high enough stop whining

Trolling standard is both lame and bannable, you should probably not do it.

[bungiefan]

Unfortunately I do have processes running in the background. My computer is used for more than FFXI, a lot of the time. Trillian is always running because it's my main communication line. Antivirus and firewall programs need to stay running. There's also the matter that I'm on the only desktop computer in the house, so everyone else uses my 2 TB of hard drive space as network storage and backup. I also can't upgrade to a newer processor because of my motherboard, and building a new computer from scratch, just for this game, is out of the question on budget right now. It's also a pain to try other AGP cards with the expense involved, and difficulty of returning them once opened if they don't fix it. The game ran perfectly fine for me on this setup, with the same programs running in the background, before WotG landed. Once that came out and patched, my FPS went to hell and I've never been able to recover it.