System Hardware and performance

[Nubuo]

I'm looking at upgrading parts of my PC for FFXI performance and I'm trying to figure out what will result in what performance boosts.

Like would I be better off investing more in better system memory or a better graphics card ( I plan to stay at 1024x768 with no AA or Aniso...well maybe aniso...). I'm trying to get an idea of what hardware changes affects the benchmark numbers by how much.

If you've experimented or have ideas of what to focus on, please let me know.

I know that if I had an Athlon 64 with 2 gigs of memory and a Radeon 800xt I'd be all set, but I can't afford that. So let's stick to realistic options.

[Windsetter]

I use a GeForce4 Ti 4200 as my video card, and I have had no problems on any game (except C&C: generals (but that was not due to video card )) They average about $100-$120 (I believe).
Along the lines of Memory (where my computer is still falling a tad behind the times) I would recommend DDR PC2100 RAM (if your motherboard will support it.

[Jeniphel]

I went from a ATI 7000 card ViVo card (top of the line back then) to my current card and could run at the higher resolutions, but it would bog down
during any real 'action' (1-2 frames a/sec near S Sandy AH). I had 768MB of 133Mhz RAM at the time. It wasn't until I upper the CPU to my AMD 2500+ that I could run 'smoothly' most of the time.

Here is my System:

Athlon 2500+ (Barton core)
1Gig of 333Mhz (PC2700) RAM in dual-channel mode
MSI K7N2 Delta-ILSR Motherboard ( http://www.msicomputer.com/product/p_sp ... R&class=mb )
Some no-name ATI 9600Pro AGP card with 256MB RAM on it
WinXP Pro
System Harddrive is a WesternDigital Serial-ATA 120Gig drive
FFXI is installed on an older Western Digital 8Gig drive
I've set my Anti-Virus program not to scan anything in the FFXI directory structure.

I run it at 1152x864 with backgrounds at 1024x1024, textures uncompressed, and enviromental effects at smooth (will be normal next time I play)

I need to turn off some features....umm...hell most features (weather, foot effects, spells/things on non-party members) but it's still enjoyable.


The FFXI benchmark scores are:
3751 - High
4762 - Low
..and that's with a ton of other programs running in the background and virus-scanning on the FFXI-benchmark files.

Hope my rambling helps.

[Windsetter]

Here is my System:

Athlon 2500+ (Barton core)
1Gig of 333Mhz (PC2700) RAM in dual-channel mode
MSI K7N2 Delta-ILSR Motherboard ( http://www.msicomputer.com/product/p_sp ... R&class=mb )
Some no-name ATI 9600Pro AGP card with 256MB RAM on it
WinXP Pro
System Harddrive is a WesternDigital Serial-ATA 120Gig drive
FFXI is installed on an older Western Digital 8Gig drive

If you occasionally still have issue with speed, it is the hard drive you are running FFXI off of. the rest of your computer is superior to mine, save but I am running a 7200 RPM drive and have only rarely had lag issues but hat has been due to the old PC133 RAM I am using. With FFXI on the other drive or a different, newer, hard drive for FFXI, you could have all the effects on and not suffer much, if any lag, connection type permitting

[Liohs]

weeelll

im a pc tech ^^

frist thing I would do is set how much you want to spend and go from there

and AMD Barton XP 2500+ /w mobo is ~$150 for a good MOBO
DONT SKIMP HERE :p and youll want ~512MB ram at lest DDR333
as for yor video card go with a ATi Radeon 9700 or 9600PRO
9200 is you have to keep cost down
and with MMORPG's DONT OVER LOOK a good ISP and NIC
i like D-link i use a D-link 530TX+ coupled with 1Mpbs DSL

check out www.pricewatch.com lots fo good deals there
and you can get me on aim too ^^

oh and if you want to know my sys specs are:

CPU: Athlon64 3000+ O/Ced to 2100Ghz @ 1.49vcore
MEM: 2x256MB Dual Channel PC3200
MOBO: Gigabyte K8N-Pro Nforce3
HDD: WD 120GB SATA 7200RPM
VID: Radeon 9000 64MB DDR 4x AGP

yes my video card gimps my hole pc i havea Radeon 9600 from Gigabyta
but it doesnt like FFXI or FFXI doesnt like it -.- heh
any way im getting a Radeon 9800PRO as soon as i get the funds
the plane was to wait for the 9800 to drop in price any soo meh :p

[Nubuo]

Okay, I have the following system:

AMD Mobile Athlon 2400+ clocked at 2.0GHz because the Motherboard doesn't have a higher multiplier to let me run it any faster. I'll be rememdying that soon.
768MB of RAM @ 333MHz, not dual channeled.
Nvidia GeForce 4 Ti 4200
20 GB 5400 RPM Maxtor Hard drive (that coincidentally beats my older 7200 RPM drive).
SB Live Value
Other stuff that doesn't matter here

So yeah, it gets major slow downs during weather. I'm gonna throw a 9800SE in there and softmod it to be a 9800PRO. That should help.

But basically I was looking for technical experience from people who may have played around with memory as well as the video card and see what they had noticed from each.

And no, the hard drive isn't gonna affect gameplay much. Not if you have a decent amount of RAM, it'll load the textures into RAM and your video card RAM and not hit your Hard Drive much during the game.

And shame on you Jeniphel for running programs and stuff while playing! I turn off everything, I even have a separate hardware profile to turn off extra services (like printing) that I boot into, as well as a gaming user with no startup programs.

[Liohs]

ok you not too bad off try looking for a faster HDD and vid card
9700 should work fine

[Kio]

I think its just your video card, and possibly your processor. However, you did said that you're going to remedy that problem, so I guess its going to be taken care of soon. As for memory, that's quite a bit of memory, too bad that it isn't dual channel though. Would of help remedy your problem. I don't know if I should say this, but maybe you have a bottleneck problem because of it?

As for the Harddrive issue, I doubt it. Its true that a better Harddrive might improve proformence, but that's only the queue between the physical and virtual memory, I believe. Speaking of which... Mmm.... Serial harddrives....

[Jeniphel]

Nubuo - I really think what you are running into is a CPU issue, maybe just a tad bit of hitting the limits of your video card.

As it stands I have to turn off all weather effects, foot step 'trails', and spells from other parties....
...but when I overclock my CPU from a 2500+ to a 3200+ then I can turn almost all of those settings back on.

RAM seems to not have made a difference that I have found.

Another thing that I am weary of is how Windows does not use the network card chipsets to push network traffic - it instead uses the CPU for everything.
I forgot where, but there is a registry 'hack' to force Windows to use the network card chipset to off-load some of the load off the CPU.

And as for you Windsetter....it only needs to read from that older IDE drive once to load things to either RAM or to the swap file on the Serial ATA drive, not the more expensive write operations....

oh - last tip for you Nubo and Liohs, I've found out that the nVidia chipsets hate being mated to ATI video cards - unless you have turned off AGP Fast-Writes in the BIOS. As FFXI crashed after 5 minutes with it turned on for me, but now that it's been turned off FFXI (only PC game I play) is a rock now. (It took me actually reading the help forums of several nVidia mobo makers to find that one out - go figure that one)

/shrug

[Liohs]

yea well 2Ghz is plenty Fast for FFXI trust me
it the vid card ^^ get 9700 or a 9600Pro or XT

Af aster HHD will speed up load times

im getting a 2nd 120GB SATA drive after i get a new vid card
and going to RAID 0 them *drool*

[Nubuo]

I got a 9800SE that I've softmodded into a 9800 PRO. It's better, the weather effects are smooth now, and I can turn on aniso filtering without much of a hit, and that helps a ton.

My system still isn't putting up the benchmark numbers I want (only 5366 in 3Dmark 03 and 36225 in Aquamark), but that's cause I'm at Athlon 3000 level till I get a new motherboard. The dual channel RAM and AGP 8X on said board may help some too.

One tip, the Omega drivers bumped up my 3DMark score by 1000, not sure what he's doing in those drivers versus the ocfaq softmod drivers, but it seems to work well.