FFXI diverse problemsFollow

You always hear about people having problems with graphic-drivers in ffxi but there is many other things that can go wrong playing this game, it seems. Here is how I found out the hard way.

Being a little sceptical but since we had such fun, me and my son, playing almost all other final fantasy-games, some on emulator, most on my sons playstation, we decided to take a look at Vanadiel. We expected it to be very hard and very, very addictive. I don't understand when people complain about it being to hard. Remember the Weapons in FF7 or 8 or Ozma in FF9. Trying to get all the cards in FF8? Or all the summons in FF7? Well, FFXI should be much harder since you can be so many more people helping each other. We were playing both of us using the same account and two characters from the start but decided after a while to have two accounts. That way we should eventually be able to play the game together at the same time. (To bad we could not move one character over into the new account but with the Adventurer Recruitment program it was ok anyway. We got some new funny hats and stuff that we barelly used but anyway...)

I got a little bit extra money from working over-time and things so first I upgraded my old computer. It was a Pentium 4 1.8Ghz with a GeForce FX5200 and it was mostly running ok. I got the processor up to 3 Ghz and changed the graphic-card into a 6800 Ultra. Kept the soundcard (soundblaster audigy 2) and harddrives and memory (had 1 Gb ram already). Everything worked fine. Upgraded the computer my son has when he stays with his mom. About the same everything but processor 2.4 instead. That also worked fine.

Then came the last step: To set up a second computer in my place. This was going to be THE Gamecomputer. To cut costs, but to be upgraded later, I had to stay with a 6800 not ultra or GT or whatever and use the internal soundcard on the motherboard but still there was a 3.2Ghz dualcore pentium with 2MB cache, there was a SATA-drive instead of IDE and there was 2Gb of memory faster than the memory on the old computer. So i kind of expected it to be slightly better. At first everything looked ok but somehow it still always felt like the game run faster and more smooth on the old one. I had to lower the graphic-settings and it still was not as good as what I was hoping. Even down at the lowest settings the game was hacking and sometimes running through areas like Jeuno it was like running through water and could in some places even be like a serie of stillpictures. (On the first computer there could be some lag but not that much.)

One thing that worried me was the temperatures. Just the motherboard could go a few degrees past the recommended temperature, and this was a ASUS-board with some new fancy layout to keep the temp down. I had to put in a few more fans to keep the temp down (ended up with five and one of them a 120 mm fan before the temps were down to a more normal level). I read that these dualcore processors do have a problem generating to much heat. And during all this I noticed that when you change the registry the graphiccard seems to run much hotter and therefore raise the overall-temperature. But once you run the game with higher background-res than 1024 its very, very hard to go back to lower settings. (And doing registrychanges on the first, supposed-to-be-slower, computer didn't affect the game that much.) So I changed the ventilation for the graphic-card too, got a NV-Silencer or whatever. Still not running like the older computer. But temps were fine. At least.

I started to try different drivers that were newer than the ones recommended. Some were faster but gave strange glitches, one driver made all the mobs look like flat papercuts without color; big chunks of surrounding areas could disappear or turn whiter so in the end I stayed with the the Omega-drivers (based on the recommended ones anyway). And don't worry; I used the driver-cleaner in between each new test. I even changed the card into an ATI x800 instead. Same thing. Well maybe it worked slightly better with the ATI-card but the whole picture got more dull.

And now the game started to disconnect alot. Went through the settings of both of the computers and the router that I was using. Managed to speed up the connection a bit but when playing FFXI I still had problems. The disconnection disappeared but instead the game threw me out of full screen mode now and then. I went through hundreds of forum-threads to find any help fot this but once I tried them all I kind of gave up and since my new game-computer refused to play my favourite-game in a satisfactory way it was just standing there like a very annoying piece of crap. (And a noisy one too because of all the fans whenever I used it to play other games which all worked very fine.) Well, I thought, not only does this game use old stupid drivers but it seems to dislike any computerparts newer than those drivers to! It was like that for almost two months.

Then, somewhere else, I read that the best for windows xp is a pagefile 2.5 times bigger than your actual physical ram, so I plugged in another harddrive, since windows doesn't allow you to set the size bigger than 4096kb on one partition, and set up another pagefile on that. It is apparently not good to have several partitions from one physical drive either. What I did was that I put a smaller pagefile on the C-drive and a big one on the D-drive. (Since I have 2 Gb Ram the best would probably be to have 3 drives and keep the one on C to a minimum but then that would generate more heat...aaarrrgh.) My older computer had two harddrives already with two pagefiles and since that was working i decided to give this a try. At the same time I got a separate soundcard and could cancel the built-in one from bios.

And I don't know if it's the pagefile settings or getting a real soundcard but now the computer seems to work fine. FFXI runs nicely on both my computers, it just took a few months. I would like to get the old Nvidia card back, though, because the colours were nicer. Maybe there is a setting to change but these old ATI-drivers doesn't give you much choice. And maybe if I wait six months I can afford a Nvidia 7800 instead, but then the game might mess up again, or...?

Thanks, yea, I think so too and I'm gonna try that later during the holidays.

Ha ha, of course I was thinking of an AMD but checking around, Tom's Hardware i.e., made me finally go for an intel. The processor I have may not be the best but the motherboard accepts even faster processors. And all other games I tried works very well.
(And I have always had an intel since the days of the first Quake when all other processors were not really up to it so maybe I'm just kind of not flexible enough... lol.)
Beside that it was by the time impossible to find the AMD that I wanted here in Sweden.

Thanks a lot for this info. This will make me more careful in the future when upgrading, and I think my motherboard can deal with single CPUs too so we will see what I do next (when its time to go faster). But as I said FFXI seems to work fine now; has not been d/ced or thrown out of full-screen in over a week and no weird glitches. Hooray!
But here in Sweden they now sell "game-computers" with about the same setup as I now have. (I don't even know if they throw in a soundcard or keep the ones on the motherboard...) I wonder what will happen when all the "Svenssons" and "Larssons" bring their new expensive game-computers home and compare it to the neighbour "Nisse" that has a single-core from last christmas and there is no difference? Lol.