So need some advice. Wife and i got some gift cards for christmas. Total ammount for amazon $100. Im looking at upgradeing my pc a bit. So doni get the $97.90 AMD FX 8350 cup for better perfomance with games and sony vegas OR do i get a $72.99 Western Digital 3D NAND 500gb SSD and a Naruto Box Set? I have allnthe FFXI texture packets that have been released so some zones load slow (no to bad) but in some areas like bastok or dunes when theres lots of parties my frame rate drops into the high teens low 20s when i have 60fps set and mid 20s with set for 30 fps.

What graphics card are you using? Just curious... depending on what you have going on there, that may be the best bang for the buck.

While the retail client was always pretty CPU heavy, you did still need a decent GPU and VRAM setup to keep the fill rate up, or your FPS would dip like that.

Well I ended up going with the SSD cause my wife also wanted Naruto lol... and so did I lol. But my Full system set up its Asus M5A97 R2.0 MB, 16gb ram, 2 Saphire Tech 1GB 6790's in crossfire x format, an AMD Athlon II X4 645 64bit 3.1Ghz running windows 10 pro 64bit 23 LG 1080p moniter with 2 standard 7200rpm HDDs one 500 gig that im gonna clone when the new SSD and then a 1.5Tb drive i use for media and file storage. I will eventualy upgrade to an AMD RX570 8gig GPU and upgrade my CPU and id like to go from 16gigs of ram to 32 but thats not a must. Id really love to build a whole new Ryzen 7 Rig but im poor and have no money lol. Im currently not working

Oh i forgot to add im liquid cooled and have a 650w PSU

Hmm... might still be something up with the AMD drivers and the DX9 API mess that keeps rearing it's ugly head. Perhaps even the Xfire could be knackering things a bit (seem to recall they had issues with it back in the day). Sure.... the chips may have some age on them, but they should be pretty good for this game. MIGHT be able to offset the dips a bit if you still have some headroom to bump the memory clocks a smidge... seemed to be where I got the most benefit with my old Sapphire Vapor-X in my old Gigabyte based Intel system.

May want to squat dead center on a telepoint, go into first-person view, and look down into the middle of the telepoint to see what is getting hammered most in your system. Can use task manager's performance tab and/or something like GPU-z's sensors tab--both have the option to stay always on top, so you can still see them while the game is focused. My old i7-3630QM in my laptop rides single-digit %'s, while the nvidia GTX-670MX is spiking to 58% trying to keep the frames up. I stave off the frame dips on this old 2012 laptop by bumping the GPU's ram clock and core just a smidge.

To get the full impact of the load, need to have the point of the crystal's base in the center of the screen, otherwise it drops considerably. Attaching a screen grab of the view I am talking about at the telepoint.

You can do the same thing with the apps up while running around town and such as well, this is just the quick and dirty way I used to always tinker with my old PC rig when I played retail. It is about as consistent a setting as you can get other than sitting in your mog house watching your moogle spin and such.

Oh yeah... another thing to check, just in case. Disable bump mapping in the FFXI Config settings. Think it was on the Effects tab. That tends to smooth/reclaim some framrates for people.

Ive been doing some looking around and it could be amd drivers/gpu issue or it could be cpu multiy core issies. Seems for a lot of people forcing the game to run on 1 core helps a lot. Others doing something with the AMD drivers lol. When it comes to PC's im great at Hardware configuration fraily decent at networking and ok at small fiel editing for small things like the host file to trick programs into not trying to send activation checks lol. But forcing cores amd driver editing not so much. Im sure i could with a lot of research a good guide and time but i have a 4 year old monster that sucks up a lot of my time now that im not working lol. As for seeing whats taking the brunt of the work for the game if i try to run task manager and Nasomi nasomi crashes. No idea why. Even if i start task manager first then game will run till i pick my character then soon as i do boom crashes. I havnt tried GPU-z while running the game. Ill need to redownload it cause back in april when windows 10 has a big update it forced a restart at an odd time in the update and it got stuck in a boot loop and i had to reinstall windows on a small 320 drive recover my files from my 500 do a data srcub on the 500 and then clone the 320 back to the 500 lol.

I did that first and make no difference on or off lol

Hardware and tinkering aren't going to make much difference as this game is ancient and crufty, you need to find a set of very old ATI GPU drivers to get better compatibility (I use driver pack 22.19.164.4 which makes the game work swell at the costs of rare crashes).

Always drivers with amd. Just got to find the right ones

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