FFXIV Hardware Requirements

[Sign]

Honestly, I think we have just been trolled.

bluefan, where are you finding a 5400rpm desktop drive. they are so rare that you almost have to go out of your way to find them outside of a laptop. Average person is using a 7200rpm drive and that is more than enough to handle any and all loading a game will have.

[Celeras]

It would not be the first time I have been trolled in relation to computer hardware, the nerd in me just can't say no. You haven't seen nerd rage until you've seen somebody try to convince me that microstutter doesn't exist.

[Kurokikaze]

Yeah, you guys just got trolled...

HDD speed has no effect on your FPS. Only shaves off 1-2 seconds off your loading screens. Thats it, end of story.

Now Celeras... Find me a decent ATI card! :D

[Zeh]

haven't read anything in the thread -- how should a phenom ii x4 955 @ 3.5ghz and a 4870hd handle it? or how do they handle it, any alpha guys? will I be able to run it on mid, at least? Planning on doing an upgrade next year, maybe sooner now

[Azarael]

I am considering upgrading my CPU for XIV but not sure if it will make much of a difference. Below are my specs. Thanks for the insight!

My PC :
CPU: Athlon 64 X2 dual core 4600+
Mainboard: Foxconn C51XEM2AA-8EKRS2H
Memory: Corsair 4GB DDR2 400mhz ( PC 6400) (2 2GB chips. - Capable of 2 more for total of 8GB)
HDD : 250GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s 7,200 RPM w/ NCQ & 8MB Cache
GPU: EVGA 9800GT 512MB (have another slot open - may get another setup SLI)

I am considering getting another 9800GT and setting up SLI and also upgrading the CPU to an Athlon 64 X2 7850 2.8ghz per core, however, not certain this will make much of difference.

Any thoughts of what you would upgrade? I would rather not have to replace the MoBo.

Thanks in Advance!

-Az

[Zeh]

Get a new mobo, an i5, and a 5850. You don't have many worthwhile CPU options with that motherboard. Upgrade the memory -- it's slow. You want a 800mhz+ speed for your sticks

[bluefan]

Honestly, I think we have just been trolled.

bluefan, where are you finding a 5400rpm desktop drive. they are so rare that you almost have to go out of your way to find them outside of a laptop. Average person is using a 7200rpm drive and that is more than enough to handle any and all loading a game will have.

I never said a 7200 drive couldn't handle loading, but a typical drive will not give you that constant butter smooth game play. And that indirectly ties into FPS. I was arguing a HDD could have an effect on your FPS. It's completely false that a HDD has absolutely nothing to do with in game experience. It's true it doesn't have a large influence like the CPU, GPU and RAM does, but it's there. That's what I was arguing.

Never used to be able to fly into different areas in WoW with an epic flying mount on my Barracuda drive without that slight stuttering and dip in FPS, but near the end of my playtime with the game, on a Velociraptor drive, I could. Always ran the built in WoW FPS generator and the FPS would dip a bit when I would zone into a new area.

[Zeh]

You guys are fucking morons. Don't be Jewish and skimp on your CPU and GPU and memory and you won't have any problems. SSDs help with startup and other stuff, not so much gaming. Buy a caviar black and be happy

[bluefan]

I am considering upgrading my CPU for XIV but not sure if it will make much of a difference. Below are my specs. Thanks for the insight!

My PC :
CPU: Athlon 64 X2 dual core 4600+
Mainboard: Foxconn C51XEM2AA-8EKRS2H
Memory: Corsair 4GB DDR2 400mhz ( PC 6400) (2 2GB chips. - Capable of 2 more for total of 8GB)
HDD : 250GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s 7,200 RPM w/ NCQ & 8MB Cache
GPU: EVGA 9800GT 512MB (have another slot open - may get another setup SLI)

I am considering getting another 9800GT and setting up SLI and also upgrading the CPU to an Athlon 64 X2 7850 2.8ghz per core, however, not certain this will make much of difference.

Any thoughts of what you would upgrade? I would rather not have to replace the MoBo.

Thanks in Advance!

-Az

Honestly?

I would do a complete revamp. If cost is an issue, remember...XIV is still months and months away. Plenty of time to start saving.

Your components aren't too old, but old enough that doing an upgrade here and there is, IMO, a waste.

[bluefan]

You guys are fucking morons. Don't be Jewish and skimp on your CPU and GPU and memory and you won't have any problems. SSDs help with startup and other stuff, not so much gaming. Buy a caviar black and be happy

I've got the money to go better, so why not?

[Azarael]

Honestly?

I would do a complete revamp. If cost is an issue, remember...XIV is still months and months away. Plenty of time to start saving.

Your components aren't too old, but old enough that doing an upgrade here and there is, IMO, a waste.

That's what I was afraid of. I currently run Aion on highest settings and it works smoothly but i imagine XIV is going to be a different animal.

Oh well, time to build a new rig. darn!

-Az

[bluefan]

That's what I was afraid of. I currently run Aion on highest settings and it works smoothly but i imagine XIV is going to be a different animal.

Oh well, time to build a new rig. darn!

-Az

Well, according to initial remarks from Alpha testers, your system should suffice. I guess it will depend on how much settings control SE gives us.

Plus, it sounds like SE has quite a few changes planned, so like I said before, just wait and save right now. I've been saving up ever since XIV was announced, and I have quite a sum saved up

[darkblade77]

Figured I'd offer my two cents on the HDD discussion, although most of it has been said already.

The hard drive is generally the slowest component of any system, the "weakest link", etc etc. That's one of the reasons why programs generally shove data into RAM before doing anything with it.

That's also why loading screens are going to be a factor no matter how fast your CPU or RAM is, because they're stuck waiting on the hard drive. Any time you need to load new information into RAM from an external source, that external source is going to be the speed cap because it's so much slower.

Whether hard drive speed has an effect on a game at runtime and not loading depends entirely on how that game was designed (whether it stores all assets the player is going to view in RAM at the beginning or leaves some out to be called later; i.e. unique models or cutscenes, etc). From what I've read, it doesn't sound like FFXIV is leaving assets out at loading.

So if you hate waiting on loading screens and would like your favorite games like FFXIV to boot up faster, invest in a better hard drive or solid-state drive. But don't expect it to affect your FPS--there is no direct correlation. There could be situational reasons why upgrading the hard drive might make a given game run smoother, such as other internal processes outside the game requiring disc access and slowing performance as a result.

[Agito]

Thanks for the debates on this whole HDD thing. I know that my single 7200 rpm drive will be good enough but i'm going to be hardcore with it and go the extra mile to get something better as it will be an easy side upgrade. I see all the time that the HDD is the biggest bottleneck in a computer system but i didn't quite understand what that meant exactly but now i'm starting to understand what it means.

[Celeras]

Thanks for the debates on this whole HDD thing. I know that my single 7200 rpm drive will be good enough but i'm going to be hardcore with it and go the extra mile to get something better as it will be an easy side upgrade. I see all the time that the HDD is the biggest bottleneck in a computer system but i didn't quite understand what that meant exactly but now i'm starting to understand what it means.

With load times and OS functionality, not with gaming. I would hope that enough people(the entire thread) have said "It has zero effect on your ingame FPS" for you not to believe the single person falsely saying the opposite.

That's what I was afraid of. I currently run Aion on highest settings and it works smoothly but i imagine XIV is going to be a different animal.

If you can do that, there's no reason why FFXIV wouldn't run acceptably. Maybe not on high, but you'll be fine. Never hurts to upgrade though

[bluefan]

With load times and OS functionality, not with gaming. I would hope that enough people(the entire thread) have said "It has zero effect on your ingame FPS" for you not to believe the single person falsely saying the opposite.

I've experienced first hand loading into new areas a drop in FPS and my HDD in full seek. It's laughable you think a HDD has zero, ZERO effect on in game performance. Other genres I can agree with you, but definitely not MMOs. Talking about ones that are not zone heavy like XI and Aion.

*Edit
There really is an easy way to test this. Zip/rar up a large file, or a buncha them, and start unpacking them while playing your game. Run around into different areas and see how it goes.

[Azarael]

With load times and OS functionality, not with gaming. I would hope that enough people(the entire thread) have said "It has zero effect on your ingame FPS" for you not to believe the single person falsely saying the opposite.



If you can do that, there's no reason why FFXIV wouldn't run acceptably. Maybe not on high, but you'll be fine. Never hurts to upgrade though

Good to hear. I will probably just stick to this rig for now and build a better one over time.

Thanks all for the input!

-Az

[Celeras]

No problem, good luck~

[Heatsink]

Is this game supposed to make use of all 4 cores of a quad core processor?

Someone told me that as of tonight's alpha test, the game is still doing almost all of its work in a single thread. A second thread is usually running, but only consumes a small amount of CPU time (~5%) unless the map is called up for display (spikes to ~40%). This behavior was noted on a very fast dual-core machine. It was stated in an interview a while back that "dual core might not be enough", so if this is also the case currently on quadcore machines, they will hopefully improve the situation in the beta.

Additionally, it was noted by my source that on windows 7 x86 with an nvidia dx10 GPU, no d3d10 or physx dlls are being used.

[Celeras]

There's nothing DX10 in yet that I'm aware of(SSAO coming up in phase 2), but as of the last time I played the game was using multiple cores fairly well. When I checked, all cores were something like 15-30% load from what I can remember.

I doubt anything changed in this particular test, since the next one is going to have a ton of changes for phase 2.