Quote Originally Posted by Omecle View Post
Quote Originally Posted by Yeargdribble View Post
HAHAHAH that's a laugh. SE doesn't care enough about this game to do this. It's still piss poor emulation. It runs max 30 FPS and runs almost entirely on your processor. Yeah, when I was still play FFXI regularly I had to use really old drivers, otherwise various elements within the game would drop me down to about 2-4 FPS to the point that it was unplayable. It's been a piss poor emulation of PS2 for over 3 years, so I doubt they'll be patching jack any time soon. My computer can run Doom3 cranked all the way up without skipping a beat... but you try to play FFXI on it... no beans. Even the drivers I'm currently using don't fix all of the problems. I still drop to about 10 FPS after a teleport (near crag crystals) or during certain spell animations and certain glowing things (cutscenes with the Shadow Lord).
That's weird, I play on PC and don't have any troubles you mention other than server lag (in beseiged and sometimes dynamis). Yes, it is piss poor emulation I will agree, but if you are having troubles like that I think you might need more RAM. It's hard to compare a MMO to a single player FPS -- especially when in an MMO, RAM and processing speed plays a bigger part in performance than the actual video card.
It was fine back on my ATI card, except for constant artifacting that forced me to either restart POL or run around blind. When I got a new card I went nVidia (they even say that the game is meant to run better on nVidia). I've got a monster card, 2 Gigs of RAM and a 3.2 Gig DC processor. I highly doubt it's a RAM problem as most people don't sport as much RAM as me and still run better than I do.

The issue is in the emulation. FFXI doesn't run well on a variety of hardwares. Most PC games are made and patched to run well with various hardware configurations. FFXI is just a quick, sloppy emulation.



I've tried asking for help everywhere and tries several different drivers. I would have one of these two problems at all times.

#1: Everything would run absolutely superb turned alllll the way up. I could do pretty much anything including no lag during songs or around glowing things and crags. I was sitting pretty at 30 FPS constantly. However, if I did anything with a lot of people, like Dynamis or Limbus or sat in a city for too long, my FPS would slowly start to drop and performance would grind to a stand still. It was like having a hardcore memory leak. It was usually easily fixed by logging out for a few minutes and then logging back in. However, when you are the puller for a timed situation like Limbus, you can't just log out every 10 minutes because your performance sucks.

#2: I could do all long things like Dynamis and Limbus just fine. I didn't get gradual slow downs. Glowing things like crag crystals additionally didn't slow me down. The problem.... BRD songs would drop me to about 2 FPS for 3-4 seconds every time they went off. As a career BRD you just can't have that.


So in the end I ended up going with really old drivers that allowed me minimal song lag but horrible glowy things lag. I was also able to do things like Dynamis and Limbus as long as I didn't keep my specs turned all the way up.


For a non-single-player comparison, I can play WoW turned all the way up and even be in very crowded places and still be sitting on top of 60 FPS. Granted, WoW is arguably more archaic graphically, but as far as processing a lot of information about your surrounding (people moving and stuff), it's gonna be similar to FFXI and other MMOs.