Your processor is the problemFollow

I mentioned this in the benchmark thread (the one that is now more than five pages deep thanks to all the 90000 and 1017 panic), but if you are not getting as good of performance as you expected from a very good video card, there is a good probability that your processor is the bottleneck. Now I have evidence.

Tonight I upgraded from a 2 year old AMD Phenom II x4 to a Core i7 4770K (necessitating a motherboard upgrade at the same time as well, of course.) All other bits of hardware in the system remained the same:

- Radeon HD 7770
- 16 GB RAM (DDR3 1333)
- 120 GB SSD with an addition 1TB 7200 platter drive
- Windows 8 (I'm a *********)
- All existing case wiring, cables, PSU, etc.
- Both motherboards were gaming MSI "military grade" (whatever that means), just the old one was socket AM3 and this new one is LG 1150 or w/e the core i7 stuff is.

My "Exploration" benchmark score jumped from around 3,000 on Maximum to just over 6,000. Medium went from about 4500 to 10549 (this is about what Yoshi P's gaming laptop showed during a demo last spring.)

Other folks have reported better performance with the Core i7 processors compared with their AMD counterparts. While the upgrade in this case was from a two year old mid range AMD to a two month old upper mid range Intel, the difference in the benchmark alone is pretty stark.

Can't wait to see what the game is like now!

I actually had an awesome discussion in shouts in Coerthas with two other legitimate engineers the other day about CPU architectures. Kind of funny, but... here's what everyone ought to know about the current CPU market and what a lot of folks expect to see in the next 6-24 months.

Intel beats AMD hands down in terms of CPUs right now. A Haswell is clearly going to rule an older Phenom pretty hard, not to mention that you're going from an X4 (quad-core without h/t) to an i7 (which is a quad-core with h/t). Hyper-threading (h/t) is an Intel thing which basically allows your cpu's cores to process other workloads while they are blocking on other stuff like disk i/o, memory i/o, etc. On an AMD cpu or a computer without h/t (like an i5 cpu), your cpu cores will sit and wait for that response. With h/t, they can perform other tasks like number crunching while they wait - at least to some extent. I use a lot of Intel CPUs at work. You can really see the difference between an E3-1220VX versus an E3-1230VX where the 1220 is a quad core without h/t and the 1230 is a quad-core with h/t under some types of workloads where multiple threads are running concurrently. Intel's cores are also better than AMD's at this point, irrespective of clock speed.

AMD's got some serious good stuff in the works, though. The architecture they are debuting as the platform for both the XboxOne and the PS4 is downright impressive and, truly, is indicative of some cool new technology we're going to start seeing on the market more broadly in the coming 12 months. Of course, we haven't really played with it yet - at least not those of us who don't work for Sony, Microsoft, or some other AMD OEM partner. I suspect there's more than meets the eye from reading spec sheets on those two systems. In essence, they're going to make system memory work faster and better than Intel is doing right now, which is going to have a rather profound impact on overall performance.


You may want to consider a PCIE 3.0 video card as your next upgrade, as the Haswell cpu and 1150 board are going to support that. That will likely double your bandwidth between the CPU and the GPU. Other upgrades I'd recommend would be a second 1TB drive (I love Western Digital myself) and a second SSD and setup a RAID1 mirror for each of those for redundancy so that you don't lose data should your primary drive experience a failure. You can use software RAID and be just fine, but if you want extremely good performance, I'd recommend popping a few hundred bucks for an LSI 9260-4i controller. Don't use the "RAID" on your motherboard's SATA ports: it doesn't come with cache and it doesn't come with an IOP so you'd be hurting performance significantly be using it, even compared to using software RAID in your operating system.

Thanks for the info Cat. It's great to hear all the test data so players can make the right choices for their budget. Speaking of budgets, here is a link for that CPU Cat mentioned in her OP. It costs roughly $339 just for the cpu alone. Considering the PS4 version which is a free upgrade for PS3 players will score around 5,000 on the benchmark for only $400, the slightly better 6,000 benchmark using a top of line cpu really doesn't impress me. If only we could buy Intel chips for their actual cost, not the inflated figure they sell them to the public. A PC built from scratch with a Win 8 OS would cost nearly $1,000-1,500 to beat the PS4 version. I don't think that's cool at all.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116901

also your GPU might be a problem

your GPU:
http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=Radeon+HD+7770

Recommended GPU per the FAQ: (gtx 660)
http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=GeForce+GTX+660&id=2152

and for fun a three generation old budget gaming card from Nvidia (GTX 460)
http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=GeForce+GTX+460+SE&id=123

Yeah youll be able to run the game, but I wouldn't expect to play on max during fates or with a lot of people on screen with that set up.

Also you could have saved roughly $100 getting the i5 3570k. Same speed but without the hyperthreading, something this game and all others don't utilize. (unless you do professional work on your computer that does use the hyperthreading of course)

Since you have it, and all the other hardware you have is pretty top notch...start saving for a real gaming card XD thing will be a beast with a 770 or similar AMD card.

Edited, Sep 12th 2013 12:47am by Strangerous

Microcenter has stores all over the US so most folks who live in reasonable sized urban areas will be able to find one. The one I go to in Kansas is about a 30 minute drive. Check out their store locator on the website.

FWIW the 1090T I use in the rig that has the client on it scored an 11000 for me with a single GTX 670.

The cheapest option for upgrade(assuming you have something that is still somewhat current) will be a fan. If you can get a solid, stable overclock with a decent fan then that will always be the cheapest option.

You don't need more RAM unless you're planning on doing something that will actually put it to use. CAS latency and timings have little impact on performance.

You also don't need an i7 processor unless you plan on doing something else that will make use of HT. Get the i5 instead and spend the leftover money on a good fan. Even a slight overclock will give you better results.

Money you save on RAM and the i5 to i7 upgrade are better spent on a CPU fan and possibly upgrading the GPU.

Doesn't really have any bearing on the advice I gave you. If you wanna spend the money then by all means, but the areas I mentioned are not going to be what allows you to do what you're aiming to do in XIV.

I just have a 560Ti, and a AMD FX 6300. I know its gonna be too weak to run the game high settings, but I don't have the money for another upgrade yet(I went from a Phenom X6 to the FX 6300).

Love the 560, but think FFXIV will prove to be the final game it's able to run.

Edited, Sep 12th 2013 8:07am by TwilightSkye

I don't think the i7 really justifies the price over the i5 for gaming purposes. I just ran the benchmark to see for myself, and got a 6708 on Maximum at 1920x1080 using an i5-3570k and a Radeon HD 5870.

Not a single one in Nebraska.

Only 23 locations, not even one for each state

http://www.microcenter.com/site/stores/default.aspx

Edited, Sep 12th 2013 8:30am by Wint

I just did a couple of benchmark runs to test if FFXIV puts Hyperthreading to use.
While I get load on all 8 "Cores" with Hyperthreading turned on I get an average of 80 points less withthe FFXIV Benchmark.
Interessting points that overclocking further still nets me more points even beyond the 4ghz mark I still get good returns but it just gets too noisy for me.

Rig:
Core i7-950 @ 3.65ghz
24gb Tripple Channel DDR3 Ram
2x Radeon Hd 5850 Crossfire @ 775/1125

I don't think I have ever played a MMO that didn't have a love affair with CPUs so don't find it surprising that you get a far better score with a better CPU.