My initial attempts were windowed at 1080p. Starting off with a Radeon HD 5770 1 GB GDDR5, I was struggling at the highest settings, scoring a frame rate between high single digits and into the mid teens at best. The only way I could near a solid 30 frames per second was to put all the settings on the lowest. Even going fullscreen didn't seem to add more than a few FPS in total, although dropping to 720p earned several more digits.
I threw in a second 5770, only to learn CrossFire was not officially supported. This quick little fix from Voices of the Twelve was a significant help. At 1080p, fullscreen, with settings on almost the max (Ambient Occlusion and Multisampling turned off), I was rocking an FPS mostly in the high twenties up to the early forties.
I turned CrossFire off just to go back and compare, and with the same settings but in windowed mode I was pushing close to a constant 30fps in most areas, only dropped into the low twenties near camp.
Okay, now I'm just confused, because it was absolutely not running that well on one card when I first gave XIV a whirl several days ago. I'm not sure if I just did something without realizing it, or if it's because there seems to be significantly less people on now after the initial rush, or because SE made some genuine improvements over the past few days worth of updates. Heck, it might be a combination of the three, but I'm not complaining! Would be useful to know, though!
On a side note, it turns out my second 5770 has a core clock speed of 900Mhz, faster by 50 than my other one, so I need to get back inside the computer and swap them so the primary is the faster one. Whoops, guess I need to pay more attention to that sort of thing!
Issues I'd like to see addressed:
Stability. You can't tab out of fullscreen, or even open a window that requires Administrator permission if you're in windowed mode, without killing the game. XI's an old game, it's somewhat understandable. But Phantasy Star Universe came out in '06, and by then it was already inexcusable. Now we're in 2010... it's just absurd.
Official CrossFire support, including CrossFire in Windowed mode. If I'm running it at 20-30 frames per second at 1080p, windowed, with CrossFireX going I imagine I could crank up the mutliesampling and still get a boost in frames!
Hardware mouse support. SE has come out and said they're not too worried about hardware mouse support, instead leaving us with a laggy cursor that varies with your framerate. While they never said why, the theory is Japanese gamers tend to prefer gamepads. And so, much like CrossFire support, it's been the community who fixed it for them. In-ex-cusable.
Sometimes I wonder if the internet allows developers to be lazy, because they can rely on a dedicated fanbase to do their work for them. Kind've like how George Lucas could do whatever the heck he wanted to with the new Star Wars trilogy, because legions of fans would jump to his defense to argue the rationality of every single niggling little plothole.
Something I didn't notice initially that blows my mind, however: "Disable cutscene effects." I thought this had to do with effects during cutscenes, but apparently with it checked you're able to skip cutscenes. XI was so chock-full of self-important, rambling dialog, this is pretty good news! I'm honestly surprised SE is letting us skip over their always brilliant, poignant storylines, but again I give them props!
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