Hardware questionFollow

I have been having a problem with this game ever since I renewed my sub almost 2 months ago. I CONSTANTLY d/c in Crawler's Nest and Jeuno. I figure it has to be the concentration of people, but this happens even with "Number of characters displayed" at the lowest setting. I've rolled back my drivers, used the most up-to-date ones, and played with different configurations, but nothing helps.

System:

Motherboard: ASRock z77
CPU: Intel i-3570k
RAM: 8GB (2x4GB) G.Skill
GPU: EVGA 660ti Superclocked
PSU: Corsair 750W Gold
HDD: Samsung 1TB 7200rpm

Any help would be appreciated, as it is taking me FOREVER to level subs atm for COR.

Constantly DC or constantly crash?

Disconnects are more likely a sign of networking troubles. Straight up crashes are more likely a sign of graphics issues as being discussed.

Who is your ISP? What speeds are you paying for and what speeds are you getting? Do you have admin access to your router? Are you running a firewall?

Hardwarewise, you have a decent midrange gaming setup. Plenty of power from a decent power supply maker, a good amount of ram (gskil is pretty reliable) and a decent video card. I would be curious as to what size monitor you are driving. if its a 24" or larger, than you still might just be running out of video horsepower. Though if it only happens in two specific spots with any regularity, it could be that you have a corrupted texture file somewhere in the installation directory and its crashing the game. Heat is also a possibility depending on what type of case you have, how many fans, clearance to vents, temperature inside the house, etc. Things I would try are:

1. Run the windows memory Diagnostic from the start menu of windows 7 (you have over 4GB ram, so I'm assuming windows 7 here. vista has one too I suppose though) if it passes clean your ram is probably good.

2. run checkdisk on your drive, and run a manual defragmentation on the drive. Then run any file system scans the game has, if any.

3. If you are still having issues, download speedfan and check motherboard temperatures at idle and during game run, as well as check for errors on the SMART tab inside to see if your hard drives are having problems. Thats a new enough setup from the components that it shouldn't be unless you reused an old drive, but it could be about the same timeframe as the massive floods that destroyed the thailand hard drive factories, which forced production to india using bearings that are tending to wear out quickly. Thats the reason drives made during that time tended to only have a 1 year warranty compared to the 3-5 that was previously the norm.

Thanks for the replies guys

Catwho - The game crashes. Screen goes black for about 3 seconds, then the window pops up white again and tells me PoL quit responding. I also get a system message saying "Your display driver stopped working, but has successfully recovered." ISP is Comcast, 50GB/s plan, haven't run to see what I'm actually getting. Only been in this apartment 2 weeks, haven't messed with the router since I got it turned on.

Kaolian - I will run those things tonight after some xp on COR. Running on a 23-24" monitor.

I run the EVGA software that came with the card to monitor speed, temp, etc. Running the game idle is around 30* C, congested areas and actual xp parties get it as high as 41* C.

2 100mm fans in front, 1 in back and a large (250mm?) fan on top, EVO 212 cooler on the processor.

Have you tried rolling back your video drivers?

Windows 7. I Have Run The Game On New Drivers And Rolled Back Ones. My Phone Capitalizes Every Word, For Some Reason...

I'll think about it; I don't see any problems off the bat though. This is to be basically starter and I upgrade over time.

Edited, Jul 5th 2013 1:08pm by maryadavies

His computer is pretty much a dream compared to the PS2.



The physical size of a monitor has no bearing as to the strain on the graphics card. Power draw from the wall, quite probably, but for the most part, only pixel count and refresh rate is going to have an impact on the GPU.

When this game first came out, I played it on a P4 2.533GHz, 2GB RAM, Radeon 9000 Laptop from 2002 and never had any problems with the game's playability, though admittedly, I never played with the sound on while playing on that machine, but I did use the registry tweaks to do some super sampling. I played on that machine up through aht urhgan.

FFXI is not a particularly demanding game in terms of PC components. And areas where the game does seem to choke a little bit, will choke on the most extreme of machines too. An OC'd 3960x with 16GBs of RAM and other components of a similar tier will not grant some magic harness over XI and make it have none of the flaws most people would want to attribute to a slow pc. Load times when zoning are basically the same whether you use an HDD or SSD. The chat log will still stutter flow with lots of action going on. etc etc

The OP's issues:
Sounds like a video card issue.

"congested areas and actual xp parties get it as high as 41* C." - The temps are more than fine. In that respect your GPU is barely breaking a sweat.



That's where your attention is required. Something is happening on your system: component malfunction or driver malfunction. The graphics driver comes to a screeching stop and restarts due to whatever the problem is.

This could be the result of a bad driver install, or something flaking out on the gpu, motherboard, or possibly psu.

An entire resinstall of the whole system may fix it if the problem is in software.

Alternatively, you could try replacing components with a "known good". Borrow a GPU from someone or go back to an old one you've got tucked away some place. Loan the GPU to someone and see if they have any problems.

Does the issue happen in other more demanding games? Have you tried running any graphical benchmarks to see if those crash the system as well?



Edited, Jul 5th 2013 11:19pm by Torzak

So, I reinstalled the newest driver for NVIDIA and haven't had the problem in a couple days, will see how that goes. I have weather effects off and shadows at simple, will turn those off also to see how things go. CPU is an i-5, so no hyperthreading. Thanks again for the suggestions guys, I have this page bookmarked in case I need to come back to it ^^

A larger physical screen size often results in a higher resolution with a higher pixel count obviously. A higher resolution uses more video resources. A larger resolution with antiisotropic filtering and antialiasing most definitly takes more resources on a 50" LED TV than it does on a little 17" lcd simply because of the fact that that 17" LCD can't hit the same resolution.

I'm not going to be staring at a 50" television from half a foot away like I am a tablet or a smart phone, so the higher pixel density really doesn't help as much.

You've missed the point entirely.

4-5ft is proper distance?