PC Frame Rate

So for as long as I have played FFXI has never gone over 29 fps and recently I was bored enough to look up how to turn a pseudo anti alias for the game by messing with the registry, etc. And I got to thinking, why the hell the game is locked at 29 fps.

I have seen the 360 version run very smooth at times. And also read up online that because of NVidia (I have a 8800GT) not exactly doing anything particularly about it, and probably the engine it self it wont exceed 29 fps on the computer.

So on that note, does anyone have any info on this? Because I really want to make this game sexified and run upwards of 60 frames a second like I have seen in Altana viewer and such.

Yah all I have been able to find info on and do is just increase the mip mapping and texture samples so it looks clearer and has a "fake" anti alias.

Not me, I'm no geek.

damn PS2 players though, upgrade or GTFO

Seriously I mean I don't try to play ***on a super nintendo well ok old school rpgs but thats for nostalgia not for serious playing. PS2 is what over a decade old now?

yah I use all of that, It looks great, I just want my 60 fps D:

You can't. Runing it @60fps would make all animations be twice faster than normal... Phantasy Star Online Blue:Burst is working the same way (capped @30).

NTSC is 30 fps for TV.

And PC version is just a lulzworthy console-port.

Lot of PS2 games run @ 59.94 FPS. The fact that NTSC base framerate is 29.97fps doesn't explain by itself why SE decided to cap the game at 29.97 and not letting it run @59.94.

Well I'd say that because of PS2 hardware, prolly too much to display for a PS2 @59.94 so they just capped the framerate at 29.97fps, no slowdown sensation when the speed is capped. Same also happen on PSP games which are too demanding. Instead of runing @60.00fps, they're being capped at 30fps, sometime at 20fps (during multiplayer).

Please explain how increasing the cap would matter? Who can run the game at it's current cap 99% of the time? Do any of you have and play the PS2 version?

Yes the PC version runs at a higher resolution. But the PS2 does a far better job with graphical effects (such as weather) than the PC or 360 version. There is a notable difference in how the world looks between daytime and nighttime. When it's raining it really looks like it's raining. When your in the northlands and the weather condition is currently a blizzard, you're visibility is greatly reduced. Even heat has a noticeable graphical effect. These things really do impact gameplay (especially the blizzard effect). Oh did I mention that you can zoom the map view all the way out so the entire map is displayed. Don't understand why you can not do this on the 360 or PC versions.

SE couldnt choose how they wanted to make the UI and graphics...

so they did 3 different sets of them
for 3 different systems

and what people like the best will be in the next mmo!

Weather on the PC version is a framerate killer...don't ask me why, it just is, so I turn that ***off. I mean, even after upgrading my PC (Quad Core proc, 4 GB's DDR2800 Ram, 2 512MB PCIe vid cards in crossfire) I still lost 5-6 FPS with them on, according to Fraps.

Maybe if they ever released that DirectX 9.0c compatibility like they promised us 2 years ago it would make things run better...but as that's pretty much been swept under the rug and never talked about again, prolly never happen now.

It is the engine, my computer bogs down randomly in spots too and my computer far surpasses the requirements for the game. The FFXI engine just doesn't allow supper awesomeness like I want. But still the game looks damn good at times.

Oh, I agree, the game is beautiful, especially on PC when you kick up the graphics via the registry edit. I just wish it could take better advantage of modern hardware...

Not that I want it to turn into Crysis or anything (lol, I can only run that game on MEDIUM without it getting lagtastic), but I think if it utilized graphics cards better the difference would be night and day...

I do everything you just said on my comp.

please assist! how do you kick up the graphics via the registry edit? i wanna do that D:

Here's a good guide

If your computer is even remotely modern (like 6 years old or newer lol), you can do this. Just be sure to backup your registry in case something breaks, or at the very least, write down the previous values so you can fix if necessary. Im sure you'll be fine though, it's pretty easy ^^

its because SE made all the animations for 29.97 fps. Increasing the framerate speeds them up and they cant be assed to fix it. and of course theres the age old 'PS2 Limitations' excuse along with their age old rant about not wanting the ported versions to do anything the original PS2 release can't do. Some BS excuse about non-PS2 players somehow getting some sort of mythical game play advantage over the PS2 players.

I for one can't see how using the GPU instead of the CPU on PC to handle graphics and allowing things like real anti-aliasing, as well as fixing the animations to run properly at higher frame rates, are a game play advantage.

/shrug

Nice thanks. it made a huge differens! :D

Protip : displaying X polygons @30fps takes twice less power than displaying that very same numbers of polygons at 60fps.

That's why framerate is capped at 30fps. PS2 is prolly unable to correctly display certains place when full of people at 60fps.

my pc runs this game max on 6FPS and its a 8800GT Nvdia gfx card / 4gb of ram .../wrist

failing to port a playstation game properly is one of SE's favorite things

Update your drivers. search for nvidia 169.17 driver and install it. It's an nvidia and Direct X issue, but these drivers were released specifically for FFXI and such

I use the lastest drivers from Nvidia and I don't seem to have theses problems. I didn't notice a difference between the 169.17 drivers and 185.85 drivers. Might be just me though.

Only problem I have noticed is that I get massive lag @ tele-crystals for some reason. I go from 29.5fps to around 11 fps @ teles but jump back up to 29.5fps once I run away... kind of strange

That's just shitty coding or something, I get massive lag there too, and I'm running Radeon. That effect is prolly all processor rendered, similar to weather, which is why it lags the game out so bad...

I've complained about this in the past...

PS2 limitations my ***. Last I checked, each update we get is always platform seperated. Xbox gets their own, PC gets their own, and Playstation gets their own. Everything is run client-side, so there's no reason SE can't just code it better for PC players and stick that in the PC portion of the updates.

They're just using PS2 as a scapegoat cause they're too lazy to do it.

As others have stated, the frame rate cap at 30fps is also linked to the in game animations and movement. Awhile back there was a device on the market that allowed you to boost all ps2 games to 60 fps, when people used it in FFXI it also doubled their movement speed so they could only use it for "flee hacking."

The original PlayStation II could only run at 29.4 FPS, so they decided to make that the baseline.

The problem is, the original coders were never told the game needed to run on other platforms. So they decided to use that 29.4 figure to hard-code a bunch of other stuff. The core timing mechanism of the entire client platform uses that 29.4 figure to do other stuff, like client-side timing of animations, recast timers, etc.

So, instead of having an animation and making it play at whatever speed they wanted, instead they hard-coded the animations such that they have exactly 29 frames for every second. This means you can't speed up the frame rate without also speeding up all the animations.

Worse, the recast timers on all spells, etc, relies on this 29.4 as the internal timer. That "You can't cast this again yet" check is client-side. If they boosted it, your spells would cool down faster, and make it look like you could cast them again. But when you tried, the server would send back an error saying you were trying to cast too fast, and likely hacking your client to do so. Same with things like movement speed.

In other words, the core system loop of the entire game is based around this 29 FPS, and it now cannot be raised without recoding the entire thing. And given that there are almost no server/client programmers left on the FFXI project in SE (only content folks and scripters), that isn't gunna happen.

How do you know all this stuff!?!