Many ppl will say it because the game is old. Thats a bad excuse as even older games runs perfect and still scales with newer systems (E.G. quake3) its basically because the game is coded bad, uses emulation software and/or not using GPU’s. Whatever he reason is its with the FFXI software and S.E. is clearly not going to do anything about it anytime soon
So... what can YOU do.
Besides general tips as reducing resolution and graphics quality i will in this guide go through ffxi specific tips to reduce system resource usage, and hopefully bring you a smooth ffxi experience as possibly.
I can’t go above 29,7 fps
This steam from the fact that this is a console game developed for tv which in the states and Japan uses the horrible NTSC that operates at 29.7hz update rate. This is hardcoded into the game so only S.E can change that.
it appears than when S.E. implanted the fps drop for fishing they also made it possible to increase or uncap the fps.
However it very experimental and untested and can maybe have bad side effects and perhaps cause banning.
Credits to Carbuncle.Xenhas & Bismarck.Snprphnx
I get severe lags near Abyssea maw & confluxes
This mostly comes from the glow effect and it gets worse multiboxing.
Install “GaiaRorshack's No Lag Patch” this will replace model to something without glow effect.
I get lag at telepoints
Again it seems to be from a glow effect.
GaiaRorshack's No Lag Patch mentioned above will reduce the effect sometimes, but a lot of the glow comes from the purple painting on the ground which there is no solution against yet.
Port Jeuno or other heavy populated areas makes my machine crawl
A lot of this comes from shadows and especially high quality (projected) shadows.
this is not due to they are cpu/gpu resource hog. Something is just badly coded.
Lower your shadows settings under “Ingame Menu” > “Config” > “Misc”
i would advise against the use of high quality shadows and just stick with low or none.
I lag badly under weather effect
Again a game effect that just seems to slow you down a lot on some system and virtually none on others.
Disable weather effect under “Ingame Menu” > “Config” > “Misc”
Mipmapping
many tweaks to the game advice you to disable mipmapping. this is generally a bad idea. mipmap is a technique to use prerendered smaller texture on objects far away. This way a better shrink filter can be used to obtain higher quality and at the same time not having to "shrink the texture" on every rendered frame.
mipmap set to 1 should be the best of quality and near the best of performance. very rarely can you get increased performance (and lower quality) by setting mipmap higher.
More info at Wikipedia
I highly recommend just setting it to 1.
I get bad performance when multiboxing on the same PC
yeah tell me about it. trying to quad box on my laptop everything was lagging but i found this wonderful and simple program
TopWinPrioB3
it sit and monitors what program you have in focus (which game instance you are actually playing) and increasing its cpu priority. this does not itself magically make your pc run faster but it “pushes” the lag and bad performance to the game you are not actually playing right now, giving you are are much more lag free experience.
this also helps if you are multitasking other cpu intensive programs while playing the game.
Update:
TopWinPrioB3 seemed to have some serious memory leak issues when using it for a long time (multiple days without a reboot).
So instead i made my own version with the same function name Project Mercury.
Project Mercury is 100% portable (no need to install) and don't write any files to your computer. It has way less memory usage and react on a 500ms responstime vs TopWinPrioB3 1sec.
I constantly get a small lag i with 1-3 secs in between.
There can be 2 reasons for this.
1: cache flushing and pipeline flushing due to the game switching back and for between cpu cores on a multicore system. Its a well known issue with old game developed with single core in mind but running on newer multicore system. I’ve personally only seen this on AMD systems but don’t rule it out if you are on a Intel CPU
The solution to this is to “lock” the game to only one core by starting taskmanager (ctrl + shift + esc You might have to click outside the game to do this)
* Go under process tab.
* find pol.exe
* Right click and select affinity
* Cross of only one core
Return to the game
2: having gamepad enable but no gamepad plug’ed in
Either plug in a gamepad or start FFXiPadConfig.exe and untic “Enable Gamepad”
FFXiPadConfig.exe can be found under “FINAL FANTASY XI\ToolsXX” where XX is the region you game belong to.
In short:
* Reduce or disable shadows
* Disable weather effect
* Set mipmapping to 1
* Install GaiaRorshack's No Lag Patch
* Make sure gamepad is not enabled when you are not using one
* Install Project Mercury if you are multiboxing on the same pc