--Benchmark Guide--

[mog-posteur]

i have a p4 2.8 ghz geforce 4 ti 4800 512 mb ddr and a 80 gb hdd(i had my pc this week).
my highest score is 5204 with nothing opened(just the benchmark) and 4969 with internet opened and a music cd inside.i think its enough

[Miles]

Once again, i have xp and i changed my language, but i still get this error message. Does anyone know what this means? I have an Nvidia Vanta 16mb, i know its really bad, is this the reason i wouldent be able to run it at all? I can run UT2003

[StudioAJ]

my mate had the exact same problem with his intel extreme 64mb graphics card, i think it's basically an incompatibility problem, i have a geforce 2 64mb, it works, slowly, but it works, and it's cheap, try going for that.

[Miles]

I will make my PC good enough to play this game I SWEAR! Im probably going to buy a new mother board and processor, 1.7 amd hopefully, then get a good gfx card from my friend. Soon ill be able to play in this world and not wait for the god knows when NA release. Btw, thanks for all your help AJ.

[StudioAJ]

No probs,
Hey, i think you don't need anymore than an 800mhz processor and 256mb ram to run it, ideally you'd need well over a ghz, ddr memory (256mb+) and something like a geforce 3, 4, or a radeon 9700, does anyone here have a Radeon 9700 and can tell me how well it works?
It's apparantly like the best graphics card ever, even better than the new Geforce that Nvidia has just released that takes up 2 slots on the back because it's cooling mechanism is so large.

[Miles]

My friend has a 9700 and i just ran it on this system, unfortunatly i need more ram, i only have 256, but will soon get another 512, and i now have about a 2 gig processor, all for FF11. I myself am going to get a geforce 4 within the next couple days hopefully.

[Miles]

Im now running around 3100, does anyone know if its possible to run the game in hi-res with that score?

[Trapezius]

Go ahead and try, I got a score of 5582 and my comp slows down with max graphics only when there are a ton of people on my screen, thunder in the background, and a major battle going on with everyone using a WS at the same time.

heh, otherwise, it works fine. You should be able to, but it will slow down if you get in an area with a lot of people or big weather effects

[Miles]

I was expecting that, i just wanna take some crisp screen caps, lol.

[BlueBlaze]

Interesting. I have a dual boot PC with Windows XP pro and ME so I tried both to see what my results would be....

*PC specs*
Pentium 4 2000MHz
Ram:256 MB
NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 440


Windows XP Pro
Score: 2788

Windows ME
Score: 3115

It seems memory does play a key role in your score. Seeing how ME uses far less ram then XP, allowing ffxi to use more of the 256. *shrugs* I plan to buy 512 mb more soon so that should boost my XP score up. No way in ALF do I plan on playing on Windows ME. :/

[Trapezius]

Get rid of ME, get rid of your cheap video card, and then use benchmark, you will get a way higher score.

that GeForce4 MX 440 is only a GeForce 2 with a different name, heheh.:spin:
I used to have one, then I got an All-In-Wonder Radeon 9700 Pro

[BlueBlaze]

How about the new GeForce FX 5200 Ultra that just came out? Its decently priced and was able to beat TI in numerous tests. Sadly though I will have to wait cause I only have enough money to add some ram and buy Final Fantasy XI now. Maybe next paycheck I'll look into buying a new graphics card, as for ME I guess I should upgrade that to 2000. *shrugs*

[KamuroIshigami]

Some additional tests, this is for praticality:

If you have a GeForce 3 or GeForce 4 MX series, you can run the game fairly well. HOWEVER, once you are in a full party (or in an alliance of parties) and people start using lots of spells, you lag.. and lag bad. Mainly because your video card can not handle it. It will get to the situation where you just freeze for half a second and move the next half with your log just spinning out of control because of the video lag.

We noticed this between three machines:
When the video card is not powerful enough, your CPU and RAM compensates, at least tries to compensate. However, the effectiveness of the compensation of distributed processing between your GPU and CPU can only be so much, because your CPU has to also process other things. Your VRAM and RAM is also the same, shadowing your VRAM to your RAM helps a little, but not by much.

The BOTTOM LINE is a good video card. CPU and RAM be darn if your video card is not of the proper performance. You can have a P4 3 GHz with 2 Gigs of Rambus RAM and won't do you jack if your video card is too slow. The video card is everything, planning to get that GeForce 4 Ti this weekend and will repost my benchmark after I have done that.

[vulcan4d]

AMD Athlon XP 1700+@1.62Ghz
256mb SDram
ATI Radeon 7200 32mb
IBM 30GB 7200RPM HDD (slowest 7200rpm in existance)
SB Live value

Score:
1st- 3483
2nd-3567

My crummy machine did pretty well, although the benchmark did look like crap. High resolution would definitely kill it.

I plan on getting the ATI Radeon 9100 128mb and 512mb DDR, and of course overclock the hell out of my system .

Do you guys think I'll be able to run at max settings?

[StudioAJ]

Hey are you talking about the geforce card that takes up 2 spaces in the back of the pc as it has such a large cooling thing?
Apparantly the radeon 9700 (about £190) beats it even though it's a lot newer.