So what does it take to run FFXI at 30fps everywhere?

[avelle]

Pretty much what the title says. I know friends that say they get 25-30fps in dynamis with full settings but I've always thought that was BS. Is it possible? Or is this game just ported to PC so badly that it's just not feasible? Really this question comes from being frustrated to hell and back with my 8800GTS. I should probably just suck it up until FF14 comes out at this point. Unless that game just ends up being awful.

[Blabj]

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a1...llernic-m1.jpg

[Olo401]

The MOST important trick is how you tune the software & hardware settings in the OS. To get the most out of the game you'll need to read up a bit on optimizing your video card's settings, as well as tweaking FFXI's Windows registry entries (to bypass the restrictive FFXI Config utility). Your 8800GTS is a good enough card to give you great graphics if it's tweaked correctly. Couple that with a 19" or larger monitor and you should be in business.

That said, FFXI is very CPU dependent so if you have a older or low-end processor it's going to affect how fast the game runs. And of course your internet connection plays a big role as well (but you don't need a Killer NIC they're honestly a waste of money).

[Blabj]

You're pretty much always going to get FPS lag in Whitegate and areas of high network traffic (Auction Houses, Besieged, anywhere there are hundreds of characters at one time...) because of the way operating systems interpret the data they recieve from the servers.

The idea of the Killer NIC is to take as much load off the CPU as possible when handling network tasks, aswell as using the Linux packet stack to interpret the packets of data sent from the servers, as it is more efficient in handling the load. However, they're very flawed, and I've seen claims that just using good QoS (quality of service) settings in your router is about the the same effect you'll get for shelling out for a Killer card.

That being said, in areas where it's lots of graphical animations being displayed on one screen (such as Dynamis, where there are multiple characters around, each doing spells, weaponskills, and various other animations) there isn't any reason you can stay at a stable 28-30 FPS with a reasonably high end CPU (atleast a dual core) a modern graphics card (anything with 512mb of RAM is more than capable of running FFXI at high graphics settings, you can easily get away with an older 256mb model and run FFXI smoothyl) and atleast 2gb of RAM.

However, with heavy graphics tweaks using registry edits, you'll be wanting to experiment a lot to see what your system can handle. Texture resolutions of above 2048x2048 you shouldn't be attempting with anything less than a very modern (within the last year or so) system, but it is debatable what benefit you get from running the game at 4096x4096 background resolutions... The difference isn't as obvious as 256x256 to 2048x2048.

To back up what Olo said, running the game while using BitTorrent and other heavy use will make the game lag (including FPS lag in areas where it is constantly fetching data). Try make your network as lag free as possible, if you have some form of traffic shaping in your router or PC, use it to prioritise traffic on the ports which FFXI uses, or set HTTP and BitTorrent traffic to a low priority setting, to make sure FFXI can get the most from your connection.

[avelle]

The MOST important trick is how you tune the software & hardware settings in the OS. To get the most out of the game you'll need to read up a bit on optimizing your video card's settings, as well as tweaking FFXI's Windows registry entries (to bypass the restrictive FFXI Config utility). Your 8800GTS is a good enough card to give you great graphics if it's tweaked correctly. Couple that with a 19" or larger monitor and you should be in business.

That said, FFXI is very CPU dependent so if you have a older or low-end processor it's going to affect how fast the game runs. And of course your internet connection plays a big role as well (but you don't need a Killer NIC they're honestly a waste of money).

That's really what gets me. I would think my computer is more than enough to just blow FFXI out of the water but I don't know if it's the 8800 or what but it just seems meh. The 8800 seems to have just had total dog crap for drivers for FFXI.

To give you a better idea, this is my setup:
Core2Duo E6600 2.4GHZ
EVGA 8800GTS 640mb
4gigs of Patriot DDR2
24" Dell Monitor @ 1920x1200
Currently have both XP and Win7 on separate harddrives.

XP runs the game quite a bit better than Win7 as I still haven't found drivers that eliminate the bard song lag that used to plague Vista. I did install the playonline site recommended 175.16s for vista in Win7 and I think that solved the song fps issues, but when I'm around another group or two of people, my fps definitely drops quite a bit.

I've got the background textures set at 2048x2048, but I figured everyone did and that my card should be able to handle that just fine. Going through my cards settings, I'm not exactly sure what to look for here for optimization. I've googled around before when I was looking to increase my FPS in other games but I never did find anything that said what my settings should be. Do you have any suggestions?

[Olo401]

Here's a guide that one of my former LS mates made..

First, you'll want to change settings in your registry. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\PlayOnlineUS\SquareEni x\FinalFantasyXI :

http://i159.photobucket.com/albums/t...fx-regedit.jpg

The items I have highlighted are what will affect how the game is displayed. The screen resolution should match what you normall use (EG: 800x600, 1280x1024, 1680x1050, etc). The background resolution should either be the same or higher. Mine is 4x the size to allow for smoother edges in-game.

Next up is tweaking the 3D settings in your video card drivers. These are the global 3D settings for Nvidia cards that I use. Note: I have an ATI card and was able to adapt most of these settings easily into the Catalyst Control Panel. -Olo

http://i159.photobucket.com/albums/t.../gfx-nvcpl.jpg

The other things you can do are tweak the in-game settings - turning off your weather effects, scaling back shadows from full to off or normal, filtering what graphics you see on screen and even setting your damage log to display graphically instead of in the chat log will all improve your FPS. However, all this will also make your screenshots a bit lackluster so keep that in mind.

[Amastacia]

TL;DR version for the sane: Don't run BitTorrent together with FFXI, past that very little you do will have a significant impact. The very few who that sentence doesn't apply to generally know how to deal with it.


Right, that said, now for the insanity:

<snip>
However, they're very flawed, and I've seen claims that just using good QoS (quality of service) settings in your router is about the the same effect you'll get for shelling out for a Killer card.

To back up what Olo said, running the game while using BitTorrent and other heavy use will make the game lag (including FPS lag in areas where it is constantly fetching data). Try make your network as lag free as possible, if you have some form of traffic shaping in your router or PC, use it to prioritise traffic on the ports which FFXI uses, or set HTTP and BitTorrent traffic to a low priority setting, to make sure FFXI can get the most from your connection.

BitTorrent is the only thing most people will notice a significant impact from, specifically because it causes congestion. It's a badly designed, horribly chatty protocol that does its best to saturate upstream bandwidth. That in turn leads to issues with everything else that requires two-way communication (stuff comes in, but can't get a packet in edgewise on the outbound side).

Past that, though, QoS for FFXI makes little sense to me. To see significant lag (beyond whatever's inherent in the network path between source and destination, which is outside your control), you need to experience congestion.

The main contributors to lag (latency) are queueing and packet drops, which don't typically occur in a noteworthy amount during normal operation. You only queue (buffer) packets when you have more coming in than you can send back out from a device, and you only drop when you've reached the size limits of your queues.

Normal web use is not going to cause most folks on broadband connections to experience congestion, and most web apps have built in congestion-avoidance mechanisms to ease the pain if they do start to cause problems.

Even heavy downloading (e.g. FTP or HTTP downloads, Usenet, unidirectional P2P in general) is not going to be problematic. The biggest reasons are, again, built-in congestion management and that they generally will not completely saturate the downstream, allowing low-bandwidth applications like FFXI to coast on top without significant impact.

In the upstream, it's really only BitTorrent which causes regular, predictable problems because even if individual transfers are being throttled, its inherent chattiness chokes the rest of the pipe, and that doesn't self-regulate.

Going balls-to-the-walls prioritizing everything and building elaborate policies to give the nod to FFXI is a hell of a lot of effort for extremely minimal gain, if you take the simple step of turning off BitTorrent while playing. The difference in latency between various levels of use of your internet connection is extremely minimal until you congest the pipe. As I said above, nothing besides BitTorrent is likely to cause that severe congestion for most people (and I imagine most of the folks who don't fall into that category have the knowledge to manage their situations). All the rest of the prioritizing might save you a few milliseconds here and there, which you will never notice.

On a side note, I'm not even convinced that QoS on a home router is very effective at managing BitTorrent most of the time. It's not the router itself that experiences congestion - it's the DSL or cable modem it's connected to. The only thing that really works is setting a hard bandwidth limit on that de-prioritized BitTorrent queue, and I'm having a hard time thinking of a router which allows separate thresholds for upstream and downstream traffic (meaning that capping the upstream at a manageable level caps your downstream a whole hell of a lot lower than it could run without causing problems). Just de-prioritizing the traffic isn't sufficient since the router doesn't know it's sending more traffic than the modem can handle and even if it gives preference to other traffic, it is still sending too much raw traffic and overflowing the buffers built into the modem.




Edit: All that gobbletygook only applies to the network side. More CPU, more RAM, and to some extent more video card will all make FFXI run better. The first two especially as FFXI is woefully CPU-bound.

[Avanarius]

The path which generates the character model textures is what hurts the game the most. Specifically, the load required on the cpu to generate this is huge and it is almost entirely done by the cpu.

Ever try to apply and generate DXT3 compressed textures entirely by the cpu? That's what FFXI is doing.

Use rivatuner to remove the textures from the character models in game, and your FPS will be 30 regardless of # of people on screen, everywhere, all the time.

[hagun]

Wouldn't removing textures result in a crappy looking game?

[Blabj]

You could use wireframe mode in Windower also, that results in a lot higher framerate without having to use RivaTUNA.

[Olo401]

Oh right.. overclocking your CPU will speed up your gameplay as well. Just make sure you have proper cooling and read up on how to do it properly without frying your machine.

[Blabj]

Oh right.. overclocking your CPU will speed up your gameplay as well. Just make sure you have proper cooling and read up on how to do it properly without frying your machine.

It might also do this in the literal sense, where increasing the multiplier on your CPU will force the game to actually run faster than it is supposed to. I've done this a couple of times before and had the game run at probably 25%-50% increased pace on everything - movement, animations, chat log. It was a surreal experience, and one I wouldn't recommend since it looks to other users like you're speed hacking.

I'm not attempting to desuade you from overclocking (far from it, I'm an advocate of the practice...) but be cautious at first, especially when messing around with multipliers.

[Reality]

overclocking shouldn't cause your game to run faster, the game doesn't have some sort of limit on how fast of a processor you can use safely or anything

you're essentially upgrading your CPU by changing the multiplier or FSB, the game doesn't give a shit how many Mhz/Ghz your CPU is

that's like saying, I have a 2.4Ghz Q6600, but I overclocked it to 3Ghz and now my guy runs faster than normal? even though you can buy a 3Ghz Quadcore and the game will run normally

[Jotaru]

Uhh

You can take a 2.4 ghz cpu and overclock it to 3.0- now you're running as if you had a 3.0 ghz cpu instead, without shelling out for a new processor... Your guy won't run faster, but the GAME will run faster- framerates and such.

... seriously though... am I being epic whooshed here...?

[Tankjr]

Uhh

You can take a 2.4 ghz cpu and overclock it to 3.0- now you're running as if you had a 3.0 ghz cpu instead, without shelling out for a new processor... Your guy won't run faster, but the GAME will run faster- framerates and such.

... seriously though... am I being epic whooshed here...?

You're not being whooshed. Overclocking on some systems will cause you to run faster. Hell changing your system clock while in game can do it too. I forget the term they used for it but I think it was frame rate syncing or locking. I haven't tried it since 2006 but I accidentally started zipping around at KA when I synced my system clock. From what I've read they autojail for this now.

[Minions]

You're not being whooshed. Overclocking on some systems will cause you to run faster. Hell changing your system clock while in game can do it too. I forget the term they used for it but I think it was frame rate syncing or locking. I haven't tried it since 2006 but I accidentally started zipping around at KA when I synced my system clock. From what I've read they autojail for this now.

Change the clock on your computer while playing ffxi... in some cases (i've seen) u speed hack for about 10-15 seconds.... PS. Don't get bant

[ShinseiRyu]

I could never find the right driver that gave me good performance in FFXI with the 8*** series cards. At fully loaded whitegate AH with max loaded characters at the highest setting my 8800GTS and Core2Duo system would bog down to 10-14FPS. On that system I used to have a ATI Radeon X1800XT that would drop to a low of 20 and average around 24FPS in the same area (whitegate ah fully loaded). Since then I switched over to ATI and am on a Core i7 system with a 4870 1GB. I still don't have capped FPS but its still around the same FPS as with my old radeon.
Edit: This is with 2048x2048 background resolution and 1680x1050 foreground resolution.


Now I understand its almost impossible to get capped FPS everywhere due to the programming of the game but for me using ATI cards gives me better FPS everywhere that you have lots of character models loaded (dynamis, whitegate, events, etc.)

I haven't tried new NVidia drivers in a while but I pretty much gave up on them for FFXI.

[Olo401]

I wonder if you informed the GMs that you overclock your PC and that it may make you appear to be speed hacking, if they'd note it on your "record" to prevent auto-banning..

Wait.. this is SE they don't give a shit anyways.

[Blabj]

I wonder if you informed the GMs that you overclock your PC and that it may make you appear to be speed hacking, if they'd note it on your "record" to prevent auto-banning..

Wait.. this is SE they don't give a shit anyways.

I called a GM at first because I didn't know what was causing it and I was worried. He was the one who informed me that it was probably due to a program that might be overclocking my computer, and that he has seen it happen before. He was surprisingly cool (I say he, might have been a woman, you never know!) and told me that he wouldn't make a record about it because he thought it was good that I was honest about it, and told me to stay logged in my mog house while I tried to fix the problem.

[avelle]

I could never find the right driver that gave me good performance in FFXI with the 8*** series cards. At fully loaded whitegate AH with max loaded characters at the highest setting my 8800GTS and Core2Duo system would bog down to 10-14FPS. On that system I used to have a ATI Radeon X1800XT that would drop to a low of 20 and average around 24FPS in the same area (whitegate ah fully loaded). Since then I switched over to ATI and am on a Core i7 system with a 4870 1GB. I still don't have capped FPS but its still around the same FPS as with my old radeon.
Edit: This is with 2048x2048 background resolution and 1680x1050 foreground resolution.


Now I understand its almost impossible to get capped FPS everywhere due to the programming of the game but for me using ATI cards gives me better FPS everywhere that you have lots of character models loaded (dynamis, whitegate, events, etc.)

I haven't tried new NVidia drivers in a while but I pretty much gave up on them for FFXI.

This is pretty much the conclusion I'm coming to. If I build another pc while I'm still playing FFXI, I may go ATI this time around. It's funny, I left ATI years ago in favor of Nvidia because of driver issues.