FFXIV Hardware Requirements

[SephYuyX]

I could only hope theyd make it DX11 friendly.

http://www4.picturepush.com/photo/a/...mg/2414527.jpg

Earlly speculation was that SE would have different graphical controls for PS3 and PC, so they whole PS2 limitations thing wouldnt hold them back again.

A number of MMOs have come out with graphical upgrades over the course of the years. During Alpha only certain specs will work, but I bet when retail comes out, 10 year old PCs will be able to run the game too as SE hasnt enable any graphical control yet.

I could only hope SE will benefit the people who can run DX11+. There really is no such thing as "requirements" in PC terms anymoe, sure some apps/games will refuse to run on older specs, but for the most part, my 10 year old laptop can run everything out on the market, albeit very badly.

Anything you go out and buy now will work, anything you have now will work too, but theres no reason to say SE shouldnt progress their graphics just because someones situation cant make the best of it. By the time XIV comes out there will be a new GPU series, and SE should allow to have that series run better than what it's using currently.

Obviously it's tons of work to keep up with the fast growing computer world, theyd have to put out a new graphical and system update every half a year at minimum. But thats no reason why they shouldnt plan for the future; IE using DX11 wireframe as well as 10, and then having the users specs determine the quality of the graphical output.

[Toxictaru]

Thats what I mean. My laptop is just about 2 years old now, was refurbished, so its about 2.5 years. Thats eons ago in this world, but not really what matters. My computer struggled with 25man raids on WoW, and while it generally does fine on FFXI (15ish fps in Dynamis, for example, which I can tolerate just fine), it has serious heat issues, and generally sucks.

While I don't disbelieve that 14 will run on my laptop I have now, it'll likely be a crappy experience just because of framerate/overall visuals.

But of course, it would be foolish to think that they WOULDN'T scale up, with new hardware... again, something that WoW has done since its startup has adapted to new technology. I'd hope that FFXIV follows suit.

[Celeras]

This will show off tessellation/DX11 more than any screenshot is capable of:

[Purrrfect]

Nice vid. That shot inside the the stone hallway in the unigine benchmark was pretty awesome with tessellation.

[sruon]

I never said 260 couldn't run, in fact I'm not sure what limited me, CPU, GPU or the 30 fps cap making it feel laggish.

I'm actually thinking it was my CPU limiting me.

Definitly going to run more test on next phase.

Ran more tests, GPU load averages 40-60%... never went past this point except during character creation (95-100%).

[bluefan]

People running XIV on their laptops...do you have 5400rpm or 7200rpm drives? CPU and GPU are always the main components for any game, yes, but for MMOs, the hard drive is a huge factor as well.

[Pikarya]

I posted a page or two back that I was using a 10k RPM Raptor and load times were damn-near not effective (Almost clocked the same as XIV on my laptop). Unless someone has SSD's in a raid format. I guess you could use that as a rule of thumb that its going to be slow regardless. (In a laptop a 7200RPM will slightly raise temperatures anyways over a 5400.

I'm starting to think the game is currently not optimized for precache/buffer between areas since its still early.

[bluefan]

Well, it's not just load times (as in load screens) hard drives have a big role in. Like FFXIV, WoW is nearly completely seemless. Slow drive + loading into new areas = massive fps droop and stuttering. I started WoW with a pretty bad 7200 drive that wasn't much faster then my laptop 5400 one. Bought 2 better 7200 drives, tossed them into RAID0 using Intels Matrix storage and load times were practically eliminated.

I suppose it could be just because of the lack of optimization. Oh, and which 10k RPM drive? Just the normal Raptor or the Velociraptor? Because the old Raptor 10k drives are actually slower then most of the good modern 7200 drives today.

[Pikarya]

I suppose it could be just because of the lack of optimization. Oh, and which 10k RPM drive? Just the normal Raptor or the Velociraptor? Because the old Raptor 10k drives are actually slower then most of the good modern 7200 drives today.

300gb/10k vr150 Velociraptor. But yeah, I feel it has a lot to do with little-to-no optimization currently done. Which I completely feel we should expect, I mean its still Alpha yet. We got a long road to go still.

[Purrrfect]

Can someone in the alpha tell us about how other games run on their system at max settings, and how 14 runs?

[bluefan]

Can someone in the alpha tell us about how other games run on their system at max settings, and how 14 runs?

Alpha has the settings locked...keep up man!

[Purrrfect]

Alpha has the settings locked...keep up man!

Did you miss the part where I said "other games"?

[bluefan]

Did you miss the part where I said "other games"?

>.>

I sure did. I have a fever.

And it's called NHL Playoffs. No known cure for it.

[Panaru]

This will show off tessellation/DX11 more than any screenshot is capable of:

Video

Holy hell. That is definitely a huge difference. It's nice to actually see things that are supposed to be round or have rounded edges actually be, y'know, round or rounded.

[Velocy]

Well, to say FFXI is more CPU orientated is not entirely true. Well fact is, FFXI is damn old, I started playing with my Geforce TI4200 on my PC and Geforce 4GO on my laptop. When FFXI started, graphic card was in fact a matter. Today's graphic cards are just tickled by the old FFXI, so the only chance to raise the speed is: CPU, Hard Disk (many small files getting loaded) and your connection latency (the speed is not that much in focus, since FFXI Network code was worked out to run ok with a 56k modem, and when I started we had quite some players who played on 56k lol).

FFXIV is similar to this. At the moment, they program it for hardware that is around the range of today's state of the art and a bit below that.

If I take a closer look at the graphics, I think it has similar requirements as Fallout 3, if I look at floors, character models. I actually run FFXIV on an Athlon X2 6000+ and a Radeon HD4950. It's not perfectly performant, but it's also not tweaked... also not running in my normal resolution ^^

I also think Harddisk will also play a big role, since XIV at the moment, seems to use similar object design as FFXIV, meaning everything is splittet in many many .dat files which get loaded as they needed. This doesn't make things too much dependand on RAM and is quite a good thing for MMORPGs. Normally in other games the developers can predict which graphic models will load in a certain area which makes preloading it into RAM quite easier. FFXI(v) has due to the huge load of models which can occure in an area (all armors, all weapons, all different races and their specific customizations, all mobs in area, all spells, skills and effects and so on) a harder time to preaload stuff, which makes it loading most models on demand (otherwise huge ram would be neede), and therefor more harddisk intensive. I think a huge performance boost will be either RAID5, Velociraptor and/or SSD disks which FFXIV (as well as FFXI) are installed to.

[Khamsin]

By the way, I just was playing FFXI and FFXIV in two separate windows on my laptop (which has a 256MB GeForce 8700M compared to the min recommended 512MB GeForce 8800), and am on Vista, and FFXIV seemed to run pretty well. FFXI, on the other hand, was choppy as hell.

I could play FFXIV comfortably with FFXI running in the background, but not vice versa.

[Pikarya]

A lot of newer games by default set themselves to a higher priority while running. I know MW2/HoN/L4D2 do this, or have an option in the configuration for the user to play with. More than likely that is the case, but since we have no "true" configuration pallet for user-end tweaking. I guess we'll have to wait.

[sruon]

Happy with my new build, runs it flawlessly though I can tell slowdowns when it loads file, just need to get a SSD and I'll be set.

i5 750 @ 3.8 Ghz
2x2Go DDR3 G-skill Ripjaws 1600 Mhz
GTX 260

GPU load capped at 80%, CPU load about 20% on each core.

[Jinko]

Happy with my new build, runs it flawlessly though I can tell slowdowns when it loads file, just need to get a SSD and I'll be set.

i5 750 @ 3.8 Ghz
2x2Go DDR3 G-skill Ripjaws 1600 Mhz
GTX 260

GPU load capped at 80%, CPU load about 20% on each core.

Thats good news, sounds like my PC should beable to run this no problem, will still upgrade to a 5870 though.

[Purrrfect]

Happy with my new build, runs it flawlessly though I can tell slowdowns when it loads file, just need to get a SSD and I'll be set.

i5 750 @ 3.8 Ghz
2x2Go DDR3 G-skill Ripjaws 1600 Mhz
GTX 260

GPU load capped at 80%, CPU load about 20% on each core.

I'm right with you on gpu (4870), but your cpu owns mine. and you has better ram. ;;