nVidia 260.99Follow

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32 posts

So the new drivers were released a day or two ago and apparently improves performance in FFXIV.
I've been testing the drivers a bit and have come up with the theory that. although very friggin strange, the lag could be affecting the FPS.

Firstly, my system specs are as follows;

CPU: Intel i5-760 2.6ghz (OC to 3.8ghz)
RAM: 4gb DDR3 1066
MB: P55 Deluxe
GFX: nVidia GTX460 x2 (SLI)

Game Settings as follows;

Display Mode: Windowed
Window Size: 1920x1080
Multisampling: 16xQ CSAA
Buffer Size: Resolution
Shadow Detail: Highest
Ambient Occlusion: Un-ticked
Depth of Field: Un-ticked
Texture Quality: High
Texture Filtering: Highest

Using FRAPS and Afterburner as judges, my average FPS in fields are 60fps, so no slow down whatsoever, the frame rate does on occasion drop to 50 FPS for a second if a new player is loading onto the screen then reverts back to 60fps.
According to Afterburner the GPU usage on both cards is between 80-100% which is a good thing.

When I'm in town however, in particular near the Adventurers Guild in Gridania, while facing the guild and looking over all the people vending, the FPS drops to 22FPS and GPU usage on EACH card drops to about 40% ea.

Now here's the weird thing.

Changing the resolution to 1440x1050 has no impact on the FPS or GPU usage
Turning Multi sampling completely off has no impact on the FPS or GPU usage
Changing to Full Screen mode has no impact on the FPS or GPU usage
Ticking Depth of Field has no impact on the FPS or GPU usage
Ticking Ambient Occlusion DOES have an impact on FPS (Lowers it to 15fps)

And it gets weireder;

Overclocking the graphic cards Core Clock from 675mhz to 800mhz has no impact on the FPS or GPU usage
Overclocking the graphic cards memory clock from 1800mhz to 2000mhz has no impact on the FPS or GPU usage

I have no idea what's going on here, and the only thing I can connect it with is the lag.
Anyone have a similar problem, suggestions or theory on what the hells going on?

Thanks.

Edited, Oct 27th 2010 12:22am by Junghwa

#2 Oct 27 2010 at 2:18 AM Rating: Good

Manosuke

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Guru

4,759 posts

Just a theory I would have to poke around a bit more when I wasn't planning on sleeping in 5 minutes, but it could be that FPS is capped at 60 and or your monitor only has a 60hz refresh rate (more simply it can display 60 distinct frames in a single second). Which would explain the lack of change in FPS when you change settings. As for lag affecting FPS it is also very possible that it is also because of the high traffic in these particular areas and you are just experiencing a larger scale drop that you experience when you have a character load. One would also expect that you would notice it around heavily populated aetherytes as well.

Edited, Oct 27th 2010 2:22am by Manosuke

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#3 Oct 27 2010 at 3:28 AM Rating: Decent

Scholar

32 posts

High Traffic = more people load
more people load = more demand on GPU
More demand on GPU = Lower FPS

Sure that makes perfect sense.
What still baffles me though is the GPU deciding to work half as hard because there is more to display.

In regards to Refresh rate, yes i'm capped at 60hz, most monitors are.
I'm using a 24" LED at 1920.1080x60

#4 Oct 27 2010 at 10:22 PM Rating: Excellent

Kaolian

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29,919 posts

Ambient Occlusion is a shading technique that makes shadows look more lifelike on 3d rendered objets. Good explanation here: http://www.cs.unc.edu/~coombe/research/ao/ which is actually kind of interesting.

It is veeeery resource intensive.

I suspect what is happening is that your video cards partially hang trying to resolve some of the shall we say "less than optimal" polygon models in FFXIV at the expense of other video processes so total card usage drops, but your FPS also drops because the card is having issues with that paprticular facet. That or it could be your CUDA PhysX particle rendering engine going to town, with all the rendered particle effects from spells and buffs floating around if they leveraged that. Maybe try disabling PhysX and CUDA and se what that does to your FPS temporarly?

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#5 Oct 27 2010 at 11:21 PM Rating: Decent

Scholar

32 posts

Thanks Pumpkin, I'll definitely give it a try after work and let you know.

#6 Oct 29 2010 at 3:32 AM Rating: Decent

Scholar

32 posts

Nope that didn't make no difference I'm afraid T.T

#7 Dec 02 2010 at 7:07 AM Rating: Decent

__DEL__1591985797860

11 posts

I have a EVGA 460 also and it does that same thing. It bugs the hell out of me. It drops me from 763mhz to 405mhz every time I get into town. My FPS also drop to about 15-20. I found that in a few small areas within crowds my core clock goes back to normal. If I stand very close to the Levequest NPCs it goes back up for some reason. If i walk a few feet away it drops back down to about half. I think I'm running the same drivers.

Necro Warning: This post occurred more than thirty days after the prior, and may be a necropost.

#8 Dec 02 2010 at 7:14 AM Rating: Decent

__DEL__1591985797860

11 posts

Also I've tried just about every setting I could. Overclocked to 850mhz core 2000 memory clock. And Nothing ever changes with the core drop. So it's one of three things:

1. It's what FFXIV is programed to do in towns

2. It's the driver we are using

3. or our video cars have something wrong with them

#9 Dec 02 2010 at 7:35 AM Rating: Good

__DEL__1592783544351

Scholar

39 posts

I used to experience this in MMO's all the time, I could never figure out what it was.

Everything on lowest graphical setting gained me maybe 10FPS in any environment filled with players. Even when my hardware is 4 years newer than the software it's trying to run.

You might just have to chalk it up to a ****** engine not being optimized very well, I hear nothing but bad stories about FFXIV, so I can't say I'd be suprised.