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Post by Bridger - Retired Paladin on Sept 22, 2006 10:36:31 GMT -5
Yo, well I bought my graphics card back in 2003, it still works great for everything, but I tend to get really choppy in dynamis areas. Casting is hard, it's harder to get off macros, fps drops.
What can I do to improve these things? Different processor/ram/graphics card?
It's been a while, I can't remember what I bought, but I think I have the following:
GeForce FX 5600 Athlon XP 1800 Ram 512 MB
What do you guys use? Do you have similiar problems?
I haven't been into the whole do it yourself computer hardware thing for a while, what do you guys recommend?
I'm not experiencing anything horribly bad, my setup works pretty well for all applications, but for Dynamis it gets choppy lol. (FFXI is the only system demanding program I really use, I don't play other games on my computer, just work related stuff like Xcel Word, ect).
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_Code
Retired Orphan
Pas De Cadeaux.
Posts: 2,804
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Post by _Code on Sept 22, 2006 10:51:37 GMT -5
Personally I've a Dell desktop with 1Gb DDR2 with nVidia GeForce 6800 Graphics card and I get little to no lag. I often times run FFXI with multi-tabbed Firefox, Photoshop, Yahoo Messenger and either WMP or Winamp in the background with almost no problems, and little to no lag.
Only real lag spikes I hit are if I go more then 2 days without a reboot; stuff like that. Al Zahbi lags me alittle bit oddly enough, but Dynamis the only even slight lag I really see is when we're all superclustered together, which is pretty rare anyway.
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Post by Bridger - Retired Paladin on Sept 22, 2006 12:13:39 GMT -5
What processor you using Code?
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_Code
Retired Orphan
Pas De Cadeaux.
Posts: 2,804
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Post by _Code on Sept 22, 2006 12:30:01 GMT -5
intel Pentium D @ 2.8 GHz (With Dual Core Technology! /cue dell dude)
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Post by corran on Sept 22, 2006 16:52:17 GMT -5
Ram is always the most cost effective way to boost your system performance while minimizing your cost, this is where you should usually start. Try www.crucial.com or www.memoryx.com. I like crucial better than memoryx, but have purchased from both at work.
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Post by Bridger - Retired Paladin on Sept 22, 2006 17:19:41 GMT -5
I use crucial, the lifetime warranty is nice.
But there gets a point when adding on more ram doesn't do anything at all and you need other improvements to considerably improve performance.
Now for FFXI, I don't know where that line lies. I can't figure out if RAM, Processor power, or a new Grx Card would be work the best. Maybe I need all of the above.
Edit:But maybe uping to 1 GB wouldn't hurt, then see how much that improves everything before I look for a new grx card or processor.
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Xaero
Soldier
Evil will always triumph over good because good is dumb!
Posts: 2,737
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Post by Xaero on Sept 22, 2006 22:05:23 GMT -5
man should jus face the fact they coded this game crappy. id hate to see the engine coding its prolly all sloppy. they could clean it up to get it to run right on pc's, but they never will
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Post by tempus on Sept 23, 2006 0:24:32 GMT -5
Bridger, throwing more ram at it might help a bit and 1 gig is always nice in any case. Your graphics card is really fine unless you wanna spend the cash to upgrade, and if you want to spend serious cash you should just go with a whole new system, the mboard would prolly be better than what you have (faster bus), and of course newer processors and newer card with the new system.
Another solution that isnt mentioned yet, but can sometimes increase performance is multiple drives. 1 drive for your OS, a seperate drive for your applications (in this case FF). Make sure the faster rpm drive is the app/data storage drive if you go this route. If you have a RAID setup with your drives, depending on the RAID type, you could be increasing your performance slightly, or decreasing it slightly btw.
Oh, and what X said applies too. Remember they built this game for a common code base to easily port the code to the PS2, which means it has some inherent limitations built it. They have actually admitted there are just some requested improvements they just cant do, because the PS2 cant handle it, and they would have to start segregating servers.
So imo: ram > new computer > nothing else cause the problems inherent in the programing code base.
-t
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Jenday
New Member
Meat Shieldplg%%Merits %%
Posts: 394
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Post by Jenday on Sept 23, 2006 0:35:48 GMT -5
Bridger, throwing more ram at it might help a bit and 1 gig is always nice in any case. Your graphics card is really fine unless you wanna spend the cash to upgrade, and if you want to spend serious cash you should just go with a whole new system, the mboard would prolly be better than what you have (faster bus), and of course newer processors and newer card with the new system. Another solution that isnt mentioned yet, but can sometimes increase performance is multiple drives. 1 drive for your OS, a seperate drive for your applications (in this case FF). Make sure the faster rpm drive is the app/data storage drive if you go this route. If you have a RAID setup with your drives, depending on the RAID type, you could be increasing your performance slightly, or decreasing it slightly btw. Oh, and what X said applies too. Remember they built this game for a common code base to easily port the code to the PS2, which means it has some inherent limitations built it. They have actually admitted there are just some requested improvements they just cant do, because the PS2 cant handle it, and they would have to start segregating servers. So imo: ram > new computer > nothing else cause the problems inherent in the programing code base. -t I give it a 8.3, lacked stuff about ladies
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Post by Bridger - Retired Paladin on Sept 23, 2006 1:09:25 GMT -5
I do believe that is the first time Tempus said something that was not a sexual reference.
WTF WHO HACKED TEMPUS'S ACCOUNT?
Edit: btw, I do have Raided hard drives, 7200 Rpm 80 GB Western Digital. I did notice loading time decrease by a factor of 2 when I installed them. FFXI and my OS run off of the same raided HD's.
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Post by Julie(Asheera) on Sept 23, 2006 7:55:52 GMT -5
WTF WHO HACKED TEMPUS'S ACCOUNT? <— >.>
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Post by corran on Sept 23, 2006 9:14:10 GMT -5
512 is crap :-(
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Xaero
Soldier
Evil will always triumph over good because good is dumb!
Posts: 2,737
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Post by Xaero on Sept 24, 2006 1:28:04 GMT -5
aye dude, cuz my system can run quake 4 pretty well, but still sucks with some things on ffxi which is quite dated. their is really jus a limit as to what we the users can do on our end
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Itachisasuke
Marauder
Loyal Homicidal Maniac
Cynicism is humor in ill healthplg%%Marauder%%
Posts: 2,114
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Post by Itachisasuke on Sept 25, 2006 8:51:20 GMT -5
i'm running AM64 4200+ Dual Core w/ 1600mHz FSB, 2GB DDR2 Low Latency Mushkin RAM, NVIDIA 7900GTX 512MB Video Card. runs like a gem.
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Post by Sosa on Sept 27, 2006 8:38:15 GMT -5
If you're running a decent card, then skip it. I've been through three different graphics cards over three years of FFXI, starting out with a high end GF-2 which was a hand-me-down, upgrading to a GF-5200, then finally my current card which is a nice, relatively new 6800GT OC. Not groundbreaking, but capable of running modern games pretty well on medium-high settings, depending on the engine. Over these three graphics cards and the benchmark tests I've done in FFXI for framecount/sec, do you know what kind of improvement I've seen in heavily populated areas? 0%. None at all. In fact, there was no noticeable change in frame-rate from the second and third card at any point in any situation I tested playing this game. I was, however, able to set 4x anti-aliasing and 4x anisotropic filtering without impacting my frame-rate in the least.
The long story short is, look at your other system components before replacing your graphics card, if it's a relatively good card. S-E didn't do the most amazing job imaginable when they ported FFXI to PC, and it's very very heavily reliant on CPU and RAM requirements. If you find your frame-rate staggers in general, particularly combat, look at upgrading your processor. If you find that you have decent performance in general play but the frame-rate dies when you enter extremely congested areas (like dynamis) and reducing screen effects doesn't seem to help a lot, get more ram. Ram is cheap enough that it would be a great investment at this point anyway, especially if you use your machine for other 'high-end' multimedia/gaming tasks or operate several large memory-hogging programs at once.
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