FFXIV Hardware Requirements

[Celeras]

Who was it earlier in the thread asking about drivers, Kawfee?

DOWNLOAD
THIS
SHIT

http://guru3d.com/news/geforce-force...-for-download/

On the nVidia site as well if you search under betas. Huge frame increases on my 470 in almost every application, even GPU score in Vantage jumped. BFBC2 went from 80max on high everything to 140+. Fantastic drivers.

[Kawfee]

Who was it earlier in the thread asking about drivers, Kawfee?

DOWNLOAD
THIS
SHIT

http://guru3d.com/news/geforce-force...-for-download/

On the nVidia site as well if you search under betas. Huge frame increases on my 470 in almost every application, even GPU score in Vantage jumped. BFBC2 went from 80max on high everything to 140+. Fantastic drivers.

Nice, thanks. Any known issues with Starcraft 2 Beta?

[Kicoe]

those drivers are pretty nice however currently for me and apparantly some others aswell these drivers dont work with ffxi windower. more like when you start pol you get the usual "windower enabled" stuff, then when you are actually ingame theres no console no plugins whatsoever.

[Alderaan]

Wow those drivers game me 7fps and about 200 points on the heaven benchmark.

[laciant]

those drivers are pretty nice however currently for me and apparantly some others aswell these drivers dont work with ffxi windower. more like when you start pol you get the usual "windower enabled" stuff, then when you are actually ingame theres no console no plugins whatsoever.

Yea, I got all excited about the new drivers then just had to roll them back. lol

[Celeras]

Beta drivers almost always break ancient software, which is what FFXI is. Third party programs for ancient software? Forget about it. If you still waste your time playing things that old, there's really no reason to be upgrading regardless.

[Gethsemane]

Just wanted to leave a few thoughts on the graphical requirements for this game. I have been running Windows 7 for awhile now, Retail Ultimate; and I must say that it's flashy, it's clean and it is fast. However. My system uses about 1.5 GB Ram up to 2.0 GB Ram just running. As much as it shouldn't matter if you have like 4GB Ram+, I am a low overhead kind of guy. And the big seller for gamers of Windows 7 was Directx 11. Granted most games are still trying to catch up to 10.

So as a gamer I actually went back to Windows XP Professional. I only use about 250MB of Ram just running so that frees up more RAM for other stuff. It seems to run quickly and efficiently and never had problems running games. Now most people will point out well it only has Directx9 and that sucks! On the contrary, watch the video below and see if you notice big differences between 9/10/11 not sure why 8 is on there but it shows the improvements they have made.

[Youtube]TYfec0PqJ00[/Youtube]

I will be happy just running with Directx9 for FFXIV which it seems is what it might be anyways, I've heard no word of them using 10 or 11. With their own custom engine I wouldn't be surprised if they built their own graphics libraries/methods like DirectX and that is what it will use so it's not dependent on Windows libraries. Who knows, but I will stick with XP personally and play it through that.

[Kalisa]

Now most people will point out well it only has Directx9 and that sucks! On the contrary, watch the video below and see if you notice big differences between 9/10/11 not sure why 8 is on there but it shows the improvements they have made.

If you read through the thread, you'll find that someone posted a video of their own, showing what a dramatic impact tesselation has on graphics. DX11 makes a huge, huge difference.

That said, FFXIV is indeed only using 9--another thing we've all already settled on in this thread....

[Pikarya]

However. My system uses about 1.5 GB Ram up to 2.0 GB Ram just running.

You're doing it wrong if you mean idle by "just running".

http://i48.tinypic.com/ehxlll.png

[sruon]

Not sure how you get those results, Win7 sucks the hell out of my RAM... I'd go back to WinXP in a heartbeat if it wasn't for my 6 GB of RAM.

[Gethsemane]

Wondering that myself, I closed some stuff and got it down to about 855 MBs but didn't have anything else to turn off unless I wanted to go through hours of streamlining my system which I won't do. Not a gaming rig elitist who tries to get everything out of their system to squeak that last 3-5 fps out. But this is a somewhat freshly installed 7 Ultimate with nothing changed out of the box.

I'm not condemning 7. Just saying for a gamer XP is probably better. But that's interesting you got your memory really low. Is it Ultimate? x32 or x64? My numbers that I got down to 855 is x64. Did you streamline/turn services off?

[Pikarya]

x64Ult

Services, Tweak Super Fetch, don't use bloat background-idle Anti-virus/Malware, etc. On x86 I can go lower, usually around mid 400's.

[Gulkeeva]

Less ram you have the less your system "uses".

I had 4GBish (I say this because I was using x32 so some the memory get used elsewhere and you get a total of like 3.5 GB or something) and winxp pro used about 1GB average.


now I have win7 x64 pro. It uses about 4GB on its own (I have 8GB)
Cached = in use
Available = in use can will instantly be free'ed to be used by another app
Free = doing nothing

So don't get worried if you see like 0-30MB free... you actually have alot more technically free

[Gethsemane]

I've always noticed that too about the memory using less if you got less etc. I used to actually turn my pagefile off and make the system run on memory alone. But I heard that if you don't have it on that you can't send Windows Error Reports. Not sure I would go that route again, and yeah figured you had the pre-fetch. Definitely a waste of resources I just don't want to tweak anything and just use Xp out of the box, it's SP3.

Whenever I get off my ass though I will build a custom system just for FFXIV and of course I would run Windows 7 just to get everything I can out of the game graphic wise. Just pointing out that Xp will probably run FFXIV with max fps even in Directx 9. Just giving some people ease of mind who might think their system can't run it, and if you want to go the cheaper route; get a PS3.

Least it's good to know there are some techies on these forums if I ever have some odd problem that I can't solve to come to.

[Jinko]

The reason it uses so much ram idle is because it has auto-cache based on what programs you use the most.

XP is fine, and will be fine for FF14 by the looks of things, but there is no way in hell i would go back to XP I would rather buy 2-4 gb's more ram.

[Purrrfect]

Just to add some comparison for systems out there, I seemed to get about 30fps out in the field solo and at one of the camps with about 10 people immediately onscreen and maybe a few more in the distance I couldn't see my fps dropped to mid-lower teens. In the big room where you get guildleves (Drowning Wench I think?) I was at 10+/- with npcs and prolly 15 or so players.

win7 x64 ultimate
core duo @ 3.4ghz
4gb ddr2 @ 450mhz
HD4870 512mb

I was kinda planning on a new setup for the game, but was hoping I wouldn't really have too much trouble with the current rig. Hopefully there will be a good bit of optimization in the game, but I don't think I would really consider running the game on much less than this. I had it ready to go on another machine (for a lowend benchmark-- p4 3.2ghz/1gb/8600GT lol) I wanted to test just to see how it would handle it but didn't get the chance.

Not quite sure where the biggest improvement would be on my main machine, even at 30fps in the field task manager was showing 50-65% use by xiv, but I didn't have anything to tell me gpu usage (though the fan had not kicked its speed up like it does in Aion sometimes).

[sruon]

GPU-Z can help you with GPU load (though it might not even work on 8600 GT...)

Limiting factor in your build is the CPU

I went from C2D 3GHZ with GTX260 (GPU-Z reported 40% GPU load in XIV) to a i5 730 and GPU load rocket'd to 80%, now I have my HDD sucking... want a SSD for 14

[Gethsemane]

Has anyone been on the Alpha with XP Professional running, whether it's a high end rig setup or low end rig setup. What kind of frames per second are you getting with Directx9? Just curious. I have about 4gbs of ram on my pc that is using XP but with my low-end system, I am thinking XP + High Settings will obviously be better than using 7 and having no option to turn Directx 10/11 off if needed.

Not entirely sure that FFXIV will have that option either to turn off 10/11 benefits. I'm hoping so.

[Gokulo]

Not entirely sure that FFXIV will have that option either to turn off 10/11 benefits. I'm hoping so.

Afaik it's Dx9 onry.

[Gethsemane]

Afaik it's Dx9 onry.

Funny thing is I knew that and was distracted by watching a show. Damn you Syfy! Damn you to hell! Thanks for pointing that out though, should have seen it when I was typing it. If it stays 9, guess there's no point in having Windows 7 for me.