[mobkon]

For the past 4 years or so, ive been running:

Pentium 4 2.4
2gigs ram
ATI 9800 Pro 128mb

My lag around Lower Jeuno AH is quite bad, and any other place where theres alot of people to load. I get what seems like 3 frames a second at times when its trying to load all the people. I am upgrading this week to this:

Core 2 Duo 1.8
2 gigs ram
NVidia 7900GS 256mb

Just wondering if my frame rate will improve at all around lower Jeuno and just in general. Ive heard FFXI relies mainly on processor speed etc. so video card upgrade wont help much with frame rates.

[Mhurron]

You will always lag in highly (even moderately) populated areas. The p4 is way over FFXI's minimum requirements, you won't see much difference going to a Core 2.

[Raydeus]

I'd love to say that your new rig will get rid of the lag, but sadly until SE upgrades the emulation engine you will still get a noticeable frame rate hit when in crewed areas.

The most practical advice I can think of is reducing the amount of characters rendered in the settings menu.

[KingOfZeal]

From practical experience:
I have recently upgraded to a Core2Duo chip (completly new everything, in fact. The only thing I kept from my old computer was the Hard Drive, which is now slaved to a new one with 2x the capacity and 2x the speed, and my one working DVD+/-RW drive. I even had to change out the power supply due to my old one exploding, literally, when I went to plug it into my new board). Have Duel SLI Video cards, the works. I originally had a P4 2.8. Mind you, this wasn't by choice. I had left the game for about 6 months just after the first update after ToAU came out (October-ish 06 I believe)

As far as lower jeuno is concerned, it's SIGNIFICANTLY better, but not because my system is better, but because nobody is there. At the time of this posting, there are 117 people in Lower Jeuno (276 in the entire city of Jeuno). Compare this to Whitegate, where there are currently just over 400 in the one zone. That's where I have all my lag and graphics problems (though Al Zahbi, when it's not under attack, is very nice to be in).

As far as framerate, I'm actually getting a fairly good framerate considering: generally about 10-20 FPS depending on just how crowded that particular area is. However, the lag I experience is entirely network: nobody and nothing moves around the Whitegate Auction House for about 10 seconds at a time, then every runs extremely fast to their position of the moment. However, my movement and the movement while they are running is absolutely awesome.

Just on a side-note, if you decide to get duel video (and GeForce is by far the best type of card to go with when talking about multi-card video), don't get a GeForce 7600 GS, no matter how cheap they are. They're decent cards 90% of the time, but the other 10% there is a very weird texturing glitch, where objects seem to actually lose their form when textures are applied. End result? Random objects/body parts disappearing, and a very annoying line crossing from the top left side of the screen to the bottom right that holds that texture. I'll take a screenshot of my face disappearing one of these days as an example. Forceware updates don't help, and Firmware updates are nowhere to be found.

[John Doe III]

I would have to disagree with Mhurron here, I have a C2D (other better pc parts as well) and easily notice a difference in populated areas, compared to my old computer.