Game More Laggy Than it should be Need Help Why

[Burzum]

Ok my system is a P4 2.6 800 FSB, 1 Gig PC 4000 DDR Ram, 120 GB HDD, and Geforce 4 TI 4800 Video Card...

Currently Running at 1280 x 1024 Overlay and 1024 background settings... Otherwise I'm using middle ground settings for textures and Grass tree's settings. Yet I still get choppy graphics on many occations especially in 3rd person view. Now I've run higher settings than these with many other games with high FPS rates. Is FFXI really his memory intensive that I have to further downgrade my graphics. For I have a hard time believeing that my hardware is incapable of handleing my current config. If anyone has any suggestions on getting better performance plz post here or PM me... THanx


BTW I run basically no programs other than FFXI when I'm playing.

[Discordian]

I had this same problem with my system. I had a P4-3.2 OC'd to almost 4ghz with a GeForce 4400 (APG 2x/4x version). Whenever I would have fog effect on the screen or there was a lot of tree / people polygon detail the game would get choppy when navigating around on the keypad.

If you have 128mb of ram on the card keep the textures uncompressed, this is because you have plenty of video memory to hold the textures and it takes work to uncompress them. I settled for a resolution of 1024x768 with Anti-aliasing and antiscopic at 2x.

If you have AA on at all at all on my 4400 in 1280x1024 it would seriously slow down. I bought a Radeon 9800 Pro on Vertern's Day and its been smooth sailing since.

[AKosygin]

Originally posted by Burzum
Ok my system is a P4 2.6 800 FSB, 1 Gig PC 4000 DDR Ram, 120 GB HDD, and Geforce 4 TI 4800 Video Card...

Unless you have RAMBUS, do you have your DDR RAM in dual-paging mode or single-paging mode? Apparently that makes a difference. (Had a friend that had similar problems, when switched to dual-paging mode it went away.)

The costs and benefits between dual-paging and single-paging:
In single-paging mode, how much memory in memory chips you bought, you get that much memory. So if you bought 1 GB worth of memory, you get 1 GB of memory to use.
In dual-paging mode, it treates your memory chips in pairs. So if you bought two 512MB memory (512MB X 2 = 1 GB) it will treat them both as one chip. This will double the speed of your memory processing and give you better speed, but at the cost of the amount of memory, which is halved. Giving a 1 GB set, a 512 MB result.

Also, is Hyper Threading turned OFF? Hyper Threading divides the CPU in to two halves (two threads) to speed up multiprocessing. So each thread gets 50% of the CPU. Unfortunately, FFXI does NOT take advantage of multi-processors, so you will be capped to one thread which is only 50% of the CPU power. Therefore, you might see additional performance increase with Hyper Threading turned OFF.

And of course, you might want to play with the AGP Video Card Arpeture size, start with the highest setting and move it lower if you have problems with video rendering until the video rendering problem goes away.

[chuchan]

your issue may primarily be the video card. you can either tone down the resolution and run with lower graphic quality. OC the video for a little more frames. check for the latest driver.

or get a faster video card. i've been using an 9700 pro. at 1280X1280 and 1280x1024. pretty smooth...but i'm sure a 9800 pro or xt will be smoother

[chuchan]

I've tested with a geforce 4 ti 4600...fastest out of any of the geforce 4 series. it ran choppy at high resolution....just an fyi.^_^

[Burzum]

OK thanx maybe Geforce 4's just can't handle it

[chuchan]

i just wasnt say this so that it doesn't offend any geforce users or give the impression that ffxi requires monster video cards. b/c it doesn't. The geforce 4 ti series will do just fine for this game. Its just that some users want to run at high resolutions like 1280 and stuff.