Open Beta Client Performance

Hi, I just got a GTX 470 recently, attached to my old system with a core 2 duo... From your tests, it looks like FPS is severely bottle-necked by the CPU (min FPS). I was wondering if you know the difference between getting an i5 or i7? Thanks.

Excellent comparison/write-up with very interesting results!

Looking at all the numbers I would have expected a bit better with that i7 chip at 4.2 paired with a GTX460; that's some serious power. This leads me to agree there is still quite a bit of software tweaking to be done to get FFXIV to run more smoothly, at least in select areas of the game.

I spent a good amount of time in the open beta over the long weekend; exploring all 3 starting cities. The only area that yielded an unexpected amount of FPS loss thus far was in Gridania and the surrounding areas. Granted this could have been due to a number of factors including server population and player congregation at any given point.
Regardless though, even in parts where I was seemingly the only player in the vicinity things seemed much more choppy than in similar situations within the other two starting cities.

I am aware that my computer is less then ideal to be making any kind of comparison (AMD Athlon X2 2.75ghz-OC'd, 9600GT, 3gig RAM), just making observational example that S-E's got some room for improvement regarding their performance coding.

Originally Posted by ace-mp4

Hi, I just got a GTX 470 recently, attached to my old system with a core 2 duo... From your tests, it looks like FPS is severely bottle-necked by the CPU (min FPS). I was wondering if you know the difference between getting an i5 or i7? Thanks.

The only i5 processors that I would look into at the moment are the i5 750 or i5 760 as they are the only quad-core i5s available. The other i5 processors are dual-core with hyperthreading and you want actual physical cores, not logical cores. (source: http://ark.intel.com/ProductCollecti...rketSegment=DT )

If I was going to get an Intel processor, I'd go for the i7 930. It is pretty much the equivalent of my i7 860 and you can overclock the heck out of it if you so desire. Note that Intel's Sandy Bridge processors are due out at the end of this year / the beginning of next year and they're looking very nice. I think Anandtech put them at about 15% faster, clock-for-clock, than Lynnfield. Without details on Intel's LGA-2011 processors which are due in the second half on 2011, I'd look closely at the i5 2600K or i5 2500K depending on how that smaller L3 cache (8MB on the 2600, 6MB on the 2500) does or doesn't affect benchmarks. Note that if you have any real desire to overclock, you're going to want one of the 2X00K models because Intel is going to clamp down on overclocking on the others. No idea if companies will be able to work around this with BIOS mods.

The later we get in the year, the less I can recommend the i7 930 with a new architecture on the way but the i7 930, 920, and 860 are probably my all-time favorite processors due to their amazing overclocking potential which pays off in real computing gains.

Alecrast, you amaze me with your knowledge... I know alot of people gospel the act of making a computer from pieces, which I believe myself able to do.. but I want liquid cooled for overclocking... and I dont want to that myself >.> so.. looking at pre-made machines... what do you think of this:


Specifications:
Windows 7 Home Premium

Processor & Chipset:
Intel Core i7-930
8mb Smart Cache, 2.80GHz
Intel® X58 Express chipset with ICH10R (I/O Controller Hub 10 RAID)

Memory:
12 GB (6 sticks of @GB ram) DDR3 1333 SDRAM


Cooling:
Liquid Cooled

Storage:
1.5TB SATA 7200RPM, up to 4 drives supported

Video:
NVidia GeForce GTX 470
"MB can hold up to 3 PCIE 2.0 x16 cards"

Audio:
Integrated 7.1 channel

LAN:
Dual gigabit LAN
"I understand the benfit of having a gigabit, but whats the point of having 2?"

Power & Compliance:
750W
PC2001

Thanks Alecrast! So to confirm what I read, you're suggesting to wait for the Sandy Bridge processors, or if not, the i7 930 (good for overclocking, although I don't intend to overclock).

Originally Posted by ace-mp4

Thanks Alecrast! So to confirm what I read, you're suggesting to wait for the Sandy Bridge processors, or if not, the i7 930 (good for overclocking, although I don't intend to overclock).

Yep, if you can wait, do wait. If not, go for it. You won't be disappointed with the i7 930 if you're upgrading from something older like a C2D.

Originally Posted by Ayelwen

Alecrast, you amaze me with your knowledge... I know alot of people gospel the act of making a computer from pieces, which I believe myself able to do.. but I want liquid cooled for overclocking... and I dont want to that myself >.> so.. looking at pre-made machines... what do you think of this:


Specifications:
Windows 7 Home Premium

Processor & Chipset:
Intel Core i7-930
8mb Smart Cache, 2.80GHz
Intel® X58 Express chipset with ICH10R (I/O Controller Hub 10 RAID)

Memory:
12 GB (6 sticks of @GB ram) DDR3 1333 SDRAM


Cooling:
Liquid Cooled

Storage:
1.5TB SATA 7200RPM, up to 4 drives supported

Video:
NVidia GeForce GTX 470
"MB can hold up to 3 PCIE 2.0 x16 cards"

Audio:
Integrated 7.1 channel

LAN:
Dual gigabit LAN
"I understand the benfit of having a gigabit, but whats the point of having 2?"

Power & Compliance:
750W
PC2001

I think the system specs are fine. How much are they trying to charge you for it would be my question. I would argue against purchasing a water-cooled system versus doing it yourself a lot more than I would an air-cooled system just because air-cooled systems are typically "no maintenance" - you keep the dust blown out of it and forget about it. Water-cooled systems have more upkeep involved so you should really know what you're doing. Plus, given that the i7 930 will reach 3.8GHz without any real effort with some decent air cooling, it kind of negates the need for water-cooling unless you're trying to do something very extreme (4.2GHz+).

Given the choice between spending my money on an air-cooled system with a SSD or a water-cooled system with a HDD, I'd take the system with the SSD and toss in a HDD for bulk storage.

As for dual-gigabit LAN, it's not really necessary for the average home user. There are a variety of things you can use it for, of course, but most people don't. You can take the 2 NICs and make them work together for increased bandwidth or for redundancy; this is typically referred to as teaming/trunking/bonding/port channel/link aggregation, etc. You could also set your box up as a router and share your connection but that's better left to a router/switch unless you're running something more robust than Windows.

Originally Posted by Validas

Excellent comparison/write-up with very interesting results!

Looking at all the numbers I would have expected a bit better with that i7 chip at 4.2 paired with a GTX460; that's some serious power. This leads me to agree there is still quite a bit of software tweaking to be done to get FFXIV to run more smoothly, at least in select areas of the game.

I spent a good amount of time in the open beta over the long weekend; exploring all 3 starting cities. The only area that yielded an unexpected amount of FPS loss thus far was in Gridania and the surrounding areas. Granted this could have been due to a number of factors including server population and player congregation at any given point.
Regardless though, even in parts where I was seemingly the only player in the vicinity things seemed much more choppy than in similar situations within the other two starting cities.

I am aware that my computer is less then ideal to be making any kind of comparison (AMD Athlon X2 2.75ghz-OC'd, 9600GT, 3gig RAM), just making observational example that S-E's got some room for improvement regarding their performance coding.

There are places in Limsa where you can go touch your nose to the wall that are (relatively) far away from other players but still the framerate sags down into the teens, as if the video card is busy trying to render objects that you cannot see. That, to me, says that the game engine's scene management could use a little work (culling techniques like z-occlusion, view frustrum, or backface culling come to mind but I'm not a rendering expert so there are probably better techniques available). I think they'll get it sorted out; I just hope it is sooner rather than later.

All that aside, however, I am pretty impressed with the GTX460's performance. I updated the article with a side-by-side comparison of the same i7 860 with an ATI 5870 in it. The numbers are from the last CB client but it's still interesting to see. I'll be updating the table with numbers from the current client tonight.

@Alecrast
i desperately need your help lol ok so this is a pc i was looking at, i need a combination of school (mostly bcuz of mom lol(:gotta love her) and gaming... anywho

HP Elite desktop: AMD Phenom™ II quad-core processor; 8GB DDR3 memory; Blu-ray-enabled DL DVD±RW/CD-RW drive; 1TB hard drive; ATI Radeon HD 5450 series graphics; 15-in-1 media reader; built-in wireless LAN; Windows 7 Home Premium

i looked at the computer itself at best buy and here's the right spec: AMD Phenom II X4 quad-core.. and later i will update the graphics card when able to. i just mostly wanna enjoy the game, doesnt necessarily need to be highest graphics on.
Please and thanks for your help :P

Originally Posted by DeadRiser

@Alecrast
i desperately need your help lol ok so this is a pc i was looking at, i need a combination of school (mostly bcuz of mom lol(:gotta love her) and gaming... anywho

HP Elite desktop: AMD Phenom™ II quad-core processor; 8GB DDR3 memory; Blu-ray-enabled DL DVD±RW/CD-RW drive; 1TB hard drive; ATI Radeon HD 5450 series graphics; 15-in-1 media reader; built-in wireless LAN; Windows 7 Home Premium

i looked at the computer itself at best buy and here's the right spec: AMD Phenom II X4 quad-core.. and later i will update the graphics card when able to. i just mostly wanna enjoy the game, doesnt necessarily need to be highest graphics on.
Please and thanks for your help :P

A lot of 5450s are passively cooled. They're definitely not gaming cards by any stretch of the imagination. I wouldn't want to run FFXIV on it due to the video card. The processor is fine. If it were me, I'd prefer a 1055T or better to an X4, however.

@Alecrast
i see what you're talking about... ok one more time...
ASUS DESKTOP
Windows 7 Home Premium; AMD Phenom™ II X6 processor 1035T; 8GB memory and 1TB hard drive; ATI Radeon 5750 (1G i think)

please be honest, even though you always are :P lol

Originally Posted by DeadRiser

@Alecrast
i see what you're talking about... ok one more time...
ASUS DESKTOP
Windows 7 Home Premium; AMD Phenom™ II X6 processor 1035T; 8GB memory and 1TB hard drive; ATI Radeon 5750 (1G i think)

please be honest, even though you always are :P lol

For gaming, between the 1035T and x4 965, I'd get the x4 965. The x6 line doesn't really become appealing to me until the 1055T which I would overclock. OEMs like HP typically make it difficult if not impossible to overclock. ASUS might be a little more flexible in that regard but no promises. The 1035T is extremely difficult to find in retail channels - it looks to be marketed mainly for OEMs so it's hard to get a good read on what that processor is capable of in terms of overclocking.

The 5750 is certainly a lot better than the 5450. Is there is any way you can get to a GTX460 (even if it's the 768MB version, not the 1GB)? The GTX460 is really the cheapest go-to card for FFXIV, in my opinion. Everyone's sense of what's playable and enjoyable is different but I was very impressed with the GTX460's performance - it was only a few FPS behind a card twice its cost.

For reference, here's a quick and dirty GPU guide. It doesn't tell the whole story, of course, but it's great for at-a-glance comparisons: http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html

hm i prlly can be able to get the GTX460.. i just dont know where at, or how to put it in myself

How to install:

Video results for installing PCIE cards

You can check a few sites:

TigerDirect
PCMall
NewEgg

lots of good infos here, thank you. have you tested the 860 with Hyperthreading enabled? I am not really sure if i should get an I5 760 or I7 860/870..since the i5 is much cheaper and also more power efficient..if you could just tell me if Hyperthreading is worth it for FFXIV?

I just know that the game uses the crystal engine which was made for the PS3 and which was used in FF XIII, and the PS3 has 7 +1 cores, so i can assume that hyperthreading could be useful, usually the people with I7 also have a better score in the benchmark than people with I5, but i would really like to know from a reliable source.

Maybe you could do one more little test with hyperthreading disabled? Would be really grateful.

Originally Posted by Jubei

lots of good infos here, thank you. have you tested the 860 with Hyperthreading enabled? I am not really sure if i should get an I5 760 or I7 860/870..since the i5 is much cheaper and also more power efficient..if you could just tell me if Hyperthreading is worth it for FFXIV?

I just know that the game uses the crystal engine which was made for the PS3 and which was used in FF XIII, and the PS3 has 7 +1 cores, so i can assume that hyperthreading could be useful, usually the people with I7 also have a better score in the benchmark than people with I5, but i would really like to know from a reliable source.

Maybe you could do one more little test with hyperthreading disabled? Would be really grateful.

I did a few passes with hyperthreading off and on for my previous article and there's no difference in performance with it either way (and so I mainly left them out). This is demonstrated in my test with only 2 physical cores active on the i7 860 and again with hyperthreading enabled for what Windows thinks is 4 processors and the performance was almost identical ( See test #1 and test #3).

The results of the test above also mean that you want an i5 with 4 actual cores (which the i5 760 has) and not 2C/2T like most of the other i3/i5s. Processor specs are readily available over at http://ark.intel.com

While I read that page you just linked, are you saying that i5 is better than i7 (atleast when it comes to ffxiv)?

Originally Posted by Ayelwen

While I read that page you just linked, are you saying that i5 is better than i7 (atleast when it comes to ffxiv)?

So I was thinking about this a little bit this morning and, interestingly, when I look back on my results with 2 cores versus 4 on i7 860 using a 5870, I don't see much of a performance difference aside from the fact that CPU utilization is much higher when only 2 cores enabled. This might be due to micro-architecture changes between Core 2 and Nehalem (i3/i5/i7)... or it might be due to some difference between the GTX460 and the 5870, how they interact with the rest of the system, and drivers. Tonight, I am going to put the GTX460 back in my i7 860 system and bench 2 versus 4 cores to see if there is no difference in performance, the same as with the ATI 5870. It could be that i3/i5/i7 dual-core is sufficient for full performance whereas Core 2 Duo is not. This also means I'm going to have to run the same test on the 720BE with 2 versus 3 cores. It's clear the 720BE already takes a large performance hit compared to i7 just because of the architecture but it will be interesting to see if anything is lost when moving from 3 to 2 cores which will paint a good picture for all the dual-core Athlon/Phenom users.

But to answer your question specifically, when processor is best really depends what you intend on doing with it. As a very general rule of thumb, i7 > i5 > i3, but the i5/i3 add integrated graphics. That's not important to FFXIV users but might be to someone else. The i5/i3 line also adds AES instruction sets which are a boon for anyone doing disk encryption, for example. The i7s range from Enthusiast to mid-range. The i5s go from mid-range to medium-low. The i3s go from medium-low to low but it's how you use it that matters.

I wish I wasn't at work right now. I really want to see how the GTX460 behaves with only 2 of 4 cores on i7 860 and 2 of 3 on Phenom II. If there is no change for the Intels, then I can happily recommend any i5 or i3 rather than just the i5 750 or better.

Originally Posted by alecrast

The GTX460 is really the cheapest go-to card for FFXIV, in my opinion. Everyone's sense of what's playable and enjoyable is different but I was very impressed with the GTX460's performance - it was only a few FPS behind a card twice its cost.

Well this makes me stoked about the gtx 465 I just ordered. Its the last part to complete the rig I'm building for FFXIV. I can't wait until next wednesday when I can finish it.


Installation 90% done by Raspinudo, on Flickr

btw alot of the wires and such were cleaned up once I made sure all of the connections were right.

Originally Posted by Raspinudo

Well this makes me stoked about the gtx 465 I just ordered. Its the last part to complete the rig I'm building for FFXIV. I can't wait until next wednesday when I can finish it.


Installation 90% done by Raspinudo, on Flickr

btw alot of the wires and such were cleaned up once I made sure all of the connections were right.

Nice clean installation. Looks good! It's nice how the Corsair H50 and H70 always make a PC seem so roomy and clean inside.

I guess the only thing I would say is... the GTX460 is a slightly better card than the GTX465 despite the naming. The benchmarks are close enough that you'd never notice the difference in actual gameplay, but in terms of power, heat, and noise, the GTX460 is the undisputed king. GTX480/470/465 are based on GT100 Fermi which is now infamous for reasons of power and heat. GT104 is a refresh, with the GTX460 being the first card built on it.