Any ATI 5970 GC owners playing FFXIV?

[Dux]

Hi All

I am having a problem with my Saphire 5970 with everything on max and Draw Detail on 10/10 and wanted to see if anybody else is having the same issue as me.

With everything on max except draw quality I have the two issues below.
1) When I have draw quality set to 9/10 and run in full screen mode it will crash after only a few minutes even though it is running at 50+ FPS and 40 FPS windowed.
2) When I have draw quality set to 10/10 and run in full screen mode I have 3 FPS even on the white menu before you reach the character selection screen and the totally black loading screen after character selection. These pages are nothing more than a a few lines of text and a poorly animated loading swirly circle.

On 10/10 the rendering is absolutely dire it is like there is a race condition is occuring somewhere but I have no idea where. I do not believe the card is out of resources GPU or memory given the awesome performance at 9/10 despite the crash

I do have a ticket open with AMD but they are trying to fob me off saying its the applications fault and you can bet your bottom dollar SE will tell me its the drivers fault given half a chance.

For those that are interested my PC specs are:
Windows 7 64-bit edition SP1
i7 950 Quad Core 3.7Ghz
6 GB RAM
Saphire 5970 2GB RAM
MB: Asus Rampage III Gene
GC Driver is Catalyst 11.3 and I have also tested with beta of Catalyst 11.4 and the problem is still present.
All other drivers are up to date.

Has anybody else had these issues or heard of fixes for ATI cards?

[DakAttack]

Re: Any ATI 5970 GC owners playing FFXIV?

TWIMTBP <--- produced for nVidia drivers

[Aeni]

Re: Any ATI 5970 GC owners playing FFXIV?

I'm noticing slow downs in Window whenever I have FireFox 4 running alongside any game (i.e., FFXIV, WoW, SC2) and I think there's a big stability issue with FF that Mozilla would have to work on. I don't notice a slow down in the game but I did notice that GPU utilization is being hit hard since 1.16 (prior to 1.16a) and I hit 73C and it just stays that way. Prior to this it wouldn't go past 60C. I'm concerned considering that ambient temp in my room has been only around 70sh F in the evenings when I play and that not having FFXIV up my temp only goes up to mid-40sh or so.

Today's version update addresses a bug in which the client would crash under some circumstance and I'm not sure if your issue is related to this. What's your GPU temp like?

[Dux]

Re: Any ATI 5970 GC owners playing FFXIV?

Well I made some progress with the AMD guy.

The 5970 will work in 10/10 detail settings and at a respectable 55 FPS in full screen mode with the caveat that you turn MSAA off. For some reason, I don't really understand the technical reasons why but MSAA seems to be handled badly for some reason and QMSAA whatever that is, seems to be a bit of a turd at 10/10. That said at 1900x1200 I dont see a pressing need for MSAA to be on as it still looks quite shiney.

Breakdown Of FPS vs MSAA levels.
0xMSAA gave 55 FPS
2xMSAA gave 50 FPS
4xMSAA have 48 FPS
8xQMSAA gave 3 FPS <-- Gah My Eyes!

At 10/10 setting I also noticed that when the animations occur for casting spells like Protect, Shell or Cure the FPS dropped quite considerable. At 0xMSAA it wasn't so bad but it became progressively worse the more MSAA I added in, this issue has already been reported in the official forums so maybe something will get done. AMD did say that they were aware of problems in this area as was SE but I didn't get a commitment from AMD they could/were going to do anything about it. That said the ticket isn't closed yet so maybe more will fall out in the wash.

The investigation continues.

EDIT: Some interesting links I found on the interwebs instead of working today.
http://killingifrit.com/forums/topic...comp-vs-ffxiv/

[Aeni]

Re: Any ATI 5970 GC owners playing FFXIV?

Your 5970 ... not sure what it corresponds with on the nVidia side. But should be way better than my GXT 460? I'll look at it later. I have 8x anti aliasing and don't have any particular issues. Been averaging 50 fps for the most part. The only thing that will kill me outright is shadows at the highest possible setting and ambient occlusion.

[Dux]

Re: Any ATI 5970 GC owners playing FFXIV?

The 5970 should beat the 480 as well as it is a dual GPU card, like I said this only occurs on 10/10 detail, if I have the detail set to 9/10 it all works fine but 10/10 it just all goes south.

AMD are kind of helping, although it seems they are working harder at not helping too much than actually helping, they seem more interested in trying to convince me its SEs fault whilst not actually proving it. Their current rationale is that other games are OK with the driver so lets just assume this one is too. And the drop in peformance when my PC renders the animations is in fact a server side problem, its lag apparently. The guy must think I am an idiot.

[Aeni]

Re: Any ATI 5970 GC owners playing FFXIV?

I'm willing to bet it may have something to do with SE coding but when I looked back at some of the issues plaguing graphic drivers in the past year, I found many instances where it was sloppy coding on ATI/nVidia's part that affected certain models for certain games. Remember that fiasco last year where some Nvidia GPUs were just getting slaughtered by lesser tiered ATI offerings on the FFXIV benchmarks? Turns out it was nVidia's fault and they had to push out a quick beta release on the drivers to amend it. I'm sure it wouldn't be any different with ATI.

But you may want to contact SE instead and see what they think. They may have undocumented bugs or issues and haven't yet gotten around to warn the general public especially since after the earthquake.

[Dux]

Re: Any ATI 5970 GC owners playing FFXIV?

I think its time I did some digging into the software architecture of the AMD Driver to understand how the client as provide by SE could be affecting the rendering. I don't like the feeling I have that the AMD guy is playing on my lack of knowledge to get rid of the ticket.

The driver as supplied by AMD is essentially an abstraction layer that manages all the resources required by the 5970 to do it's job and provides an API to the layers above it for the graphics engine of FFXIV to use. Now the question is, where does the driver end and the graphics engine as provided by SE begin and what are the responsibilities of these two entities. I just dont understand how the FFXIV client can be working "correctly" for every setting except 10/10 then magically it all goes wrong and the drivers has no involvement in this.