I've been playing for almost a year on a laptop, trying to fix my poor FPS every month or so. I can never get it resolved, so I normally say "screw it", and move on till something happens that makes me revisit the problem.

I'm normally lucky to be sitting around 15 FPS, but generally it's a little lower - This is with effects, shadows, footprints off, and a low draw distance. Once I start dual boxing and/or doing alliance-type events, I'll start to average in the 8 FPS range.

I'm running on a NIVIDIA GeForce GTX 860M with an itel core i7-4710hq (2.5ghz) processor... 16GB ram, windows 10 64-bit OS. Not the greatest laptop, but surely enough to handle this game.

I've tried multiple "solutions" I've found online, but with no luck, so I'm hoping someone may have a fix.

Thanks!

The most performance heavy aspect of ffxi is "supersampling" i.e. setting your background resolution higher than your screen resolution. A component of your hardware is not up to the task of rendering ffxi, so as a temporary stopgap you can lower the background resolution to 1024x1024 or the original default for era 2003 potatoes 512x512.

The weak link in your hardware is likely your onboard gpu (different than your discrete nvidia gpu). The last few years nvidia laptops have had this driver technology gpu load balancing between the two to extend battery life, called Optimus. Since FFXI doesn't run from a normal executable, this driver tech is not aware of it and probably thinks you are just in normal desktop browsing mode and doesn't engage the powerful nvidia gpu.

tl;dr check out the last few posts in this thread for possible solutions

Fixed... Sort Of:

I had already messed with dedicating my NVIDIA months back (though that actually helped me jump up my FPS by about 50% in the past, so this was good advice).

As it turns out, I've been running a program called "Energy Manager" to help with battery life longevity, and apparently that program was restricting my GPU output in attempts to conserve battery life. Since I disabled it, I'm up to a consistent 30FPS. While that's not amazing, it's a step in the right direction!

Thank you both for the assistance!

I to had months of problems trying to fix awful frame rates, trying all the various fixes and setting but always getting the jarring but playable 15-20 fps... that was until I tried this.

http://ashita.atom0s.com/forums/viewtop ... f=26&t=142

It took a bit of time to work it out as it sounds simple, dump a couple of files into your ashita folder and that's it, the thing was where exactly do you put them?? So I put them in Ashita, Ashita Launcher, Ashata boot, Ashita boot\Pol subfolder, even put them in the real FFXI and POL folders to be sure and BOOM 60fps (with the cap turned off), with no fuss what so ever. Even turned everything up to the max and still 60fps.

I even used it on my Girlfriends laptop, which is a £150 Tesco (Supermarket) special with no dedicated graphics card, the most basic everything and all onboard crap. She used to get 15-20 fps with everything on minimum setting but the same thing happened, now gets 40-50fps, even turned it all up to the max, and same 40-50 fps.

So we can safely say its a very simple problem, and nothing to do with Geforce anything. This game was designed for specification far and below even the most budget laptops from many years back. I believe its a compatibility issue between Direct X8 and Direct X9 onwards.

Hopefully it works for you.
Biteru

Oh another thing, the guy Atom0s created a Z-lighting fix as some testers (but not all) had shadows flickering. Both the laptops I did this to needed that fix, so may need to change it in the config from 0 to a 1 right at the bottom.

Ikion you know that ffxi is capped at 30 FPS? You should try typing /fps 1. That will set the cap to 60.