FFXI Lag And You

As many have noticed FFXI is know for random unexplained lag and just p#ss poor performance on even a new highend system.
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.
Deal with it
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

Download Section

Top Win Prio Beta3
TopWinPrio checks every now and then to see what window is active at the moment. When it finds the one, it gives it higher priority than the usual normal priority. Once this window loses focus, topWinPrio gives the window its standard status back.
TopWinPrio runs in the background and can be set to start when windows starts, just run it and forget it’s there. TopWinPrio will work in the background without you needing to do anything.

Project Mercury
Same as above


GaiaRorshack's No lag Patch v1.1
Replaces Abyssea maws, Confluxes, Telepoint crystals and magian moogles with non glowy version to reduce lag


FFXI60FPS v0.0.1
It seems that when SE added the fishing framerate limit changer in the last patch, they added some additional logic to handle timing inside the game independently of the framerate. With the ability to change the limit at will simply by fishing, it was very easy to find the code that makes the adjustment. Luckily, they made an additional provision for doubling the current cap and not just halving it! I quickly developed two test programs, one which doubles the cap to get ~58.8fps, and another that uncaps the framerate.

You can run the game at higher than 29.7fps with some plug-in or alteration, so people don't actually need to "deal with it" if they really don't want to.

Do you have any link to these plugins / alteration i would love to look into this

Not sure if its cool to post 3rd pt links directly, so Google "ffxi 60 FPS". There is a link to the windower thread.

However, while it does make the game look awesome, the thread is full of warnings that it makes your character behave weirdly to other players, like you are gliding along the ground instead of running, and the very first post, it says if can trigger SEs speed hack detection, since you may be acting faster than expected, especially at zoning.

Edit:: hadn't read the thread in a few months. Seems like a safe tool to use, some recommend using vsync just in case.

Thank you for the link guys it seems the project kinda died.
i will see if i can revive it with a more user friendly interface.

It didn't so much die, it was just never really advertised and made popular. as far as I know, it is still a usable program, but things may have changed with the expansion.

wouldn't something like this be better than CLI?

The commandline tool still works fine, so with my limited free time I'd rather be ingame than adding a fancy GUI. The source is there in very easy to understand C, so feel free to improve it! I think everyone should see how really amazing all the effect animations look at a high framerate. It's such a shame that we've been playing a slideshow all these years.

By the way, it appears that the Ashita project has support for framerate adjustment. If it's implemented the same way, the following warning applies:
* DO NOT ZONE WITH THE FRAMERATE UNCAPPED!! A zoning timer uses frame counts, and you will be disconnected. This event might get logged, but it happened to me only once, and so far no problem.

Also, if you chose to use the uncapper, you will need to make sure you are running with v-sync on at 60Hz (or 120Hz/half) refresh rate. If your framerate deviates either above or below 60 then animation timing will be off. Turning on vsync will keep the framerate at 60 or lower, and will also allow you to zone safely when using the uncapper. Movement speed is not changed in any case. The uncapper gives much smoother frame rates than the 60fps'er.

Lately it seems that Reive battles are causing enough system load that I am unable to maintain 60fps even with my 5GHz i7 with mid-shadows. I had to disable shadows to remain capped.

Control Panel > Power Options > Balance


After 3 days of not playing ffxi searching desperately on the internet, I found my solution!

My power setting was on Power Saver. And I was getting 15 fps in solo combat.

After I put it on Balance, I run around in Port Jeuno with 29.9 FPS!

I didn't know power settings effect your PCs performance, I thought it was just when your computer goes to sleep and screen turns off.


Hope this Helps!

powersaver = anything runs at minimum speed
balance = should dynamically adjsut thing depending on load
performance = max speed all the time

balance should be the right choice for anything 99,9% of the time

i might recall this incorrenctly


oh this was not a suggestion for you to improve but a show off what i was working on. stealing your code ^.^

it on purpose i only have buttons for setting 60fps and normal so kinda disencourage ppl to go unlimited, but still have tge option if you really want it.

I put mine back on balance, I'm scared something could happen to PC if its on High all the time.

balance and high should nest you the same performance unless something is not working as intended.


since I'm not able to login into the game tam due to S.E. F3cking up my Content id and no response from their support in over a week now, i cant do any testing in the new expansion.
So if anyone finds any place there is a specific slowdown please mentioned it and i can see if i can make a fix and put it into my gaia's no lag patch

Aight. Maybe someone here can help me out.
I was playing last night and everything was going just peachy.
Get like 27 fps on average. Then suddenly my frame rate crapped it self and I can't get higher than like 8 fps if I'm lucky.
Already tried turning off shadows and effects and crap but it didn't do jack. Any suggestions?

does this issues still arrive after restarting the game ?
there is al to of issues for that behavier.
it could be overheating so you cpu drops speed/voltage to remain cool.
could be a memory leak due to corrupted dat files.

is it just fps drops "randomly" or is it constantly low fps?

Persists after reatarting.
could be over heating. But i hadnt really noticed it heating up when i play.
I just reinstalled the game so im gonna see if that made a difference after all the updating.

So having reinstalled the game everything is running smoothly again.
Only annoyance is having a small lag every 1-2 seconds. Its kinda giving me a head ache.

checked this ?

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 startings 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” wher XX is the region you game belong to.

I did indeed.
No change after doing the cpu what not and it still persists after disabling my controller.

Logged in today and the lag was back whole sale. So I think its time to throw in the flipping towel...

Top Win Prio Beta3 - It doesn't state it's compatible with Windows 8. Any harm in downloading it and trying?

i havnet tried it on windows 8 but it works fine on 7

i would have a hard time thinking there would be any really issues since it basically just call a priory setting.

added section about mipmapping

Sorry can you put into layman's terms why enabling MIP Mapping would enhance performance?

Cheers :)

From a performance standpoint, flash is a terrible piece of engineering that can use alot of cpu and they try to also 'accelerate' stuff the flash engine does using the gpu which is probably increasing your overall system load (and system temperature, thus the fan is cranking up)

super simple explanation version:
Mip mapping is when distant objects use a smaller sized version of the texture to draw them, instead of accessing the larger version of the texture used to draw things when you see them up close.
When a gpu has to access the larger version of the texture when drawing smaller objects in the distance, this can cause a 'gpu texture cache miss' and be a performance hit.


extra note:
The smaller versions of the texture 'mip-map' is usually filtered/blurred to minimize 'sparkling' or aliasing, so its also more pleasing to the eye when its used to draw distant or 'edge-on' viewed surfaces like walls.

This is sort of off-topic, but perhaps someone can give me some insight since people seem to know what they're talking about!

Recently, I've begun to notice odd patterns in the sky:



I never noticed these before. Did I break some graphic setting or is this just normal and I never noticed/cared?

There are a few textures in the game that have some really terrible DXT texture compression artifacts. I've written off the sky bug as a bad texture export by the devs or something in the ffxi client setting a bad directX renderstate when rendering the clouds because they are drawn with multiple layers of tiled texture patterns.

There is no known way to fix it, i see it too. If I wasnt lazy and knew which texture .dat has the cloud textures I could rule out it being a bad texture with dithering/compression artifacts.