FFXIV Dawntrail benchmark drop and graphical updates

[mackerel]

@Kenrou I'm going to have to do some erm... "testing"

 

[mackerel]

I can confirm I can see jiggle at around 90fps. I guess I never noticed before because I never looked at erm... suitable assets for demonstrating such.

 

[Rpkole]

I can confirm I can see jiggle at around 90fps. I guess I never noticed before because I never looked at erm... suitable assets for demonstrating such.

here are a few diff FPS so you can see how it changes the physics in game


60fps

72fps

144fps

but this is what i see like 99% of the time

 

[Rpkole]

On a side note do any of yall play and if so what server?

 

[mackerel]

My main is on EU Ragnarok. I have an alt on NA Mateus that I recently completed MSQ on so I can join in with stuff with friends there.

 

[Flamethrower1972]

I can see the different FPS'S I have to look closely though.

 

[Rpkole]

I can see the different FPS'S I have to look closely though.

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Sorry had to

 

[mackerel]

They just announced today they will be updating the benchmark following feedback on some aspects of it. From the sounds of it, it wont affect the performance side. It mainly relates to the character creator as the lighting in that has always been a point of criticism, and with the updated graphics it is showing its limitations more than ever.

 

[mackerel]

Can't remember what I said where now. I have noticed performance limits with both the benchmark and actual game. Above is example of what I see. Thread 3 is saturated. Last thread is also somewhat in use. Low level usage of others. I have observed multiple systems and this seems repeatable. 7920X, 7980XE, 11700k all show this. I'll try my AMD CPU laptop shortly to see if this continues, but I would be surprised if it didn't.

The Skylake-X CPUs are getting on a bit so they're lower at single/low thread performance, and that's why the hit is felt more on them. I found the 3rd scene of the benchmark to show quite a dip when the cameras swings into the combat area. On Skylake-X I see drops to ball park 30-40fps (not exact measurement) but 11700k can hold above 60. Likely a combination of both higher running clocks and also IPC improvements. I wonder if anyone has tested even the older Endwalker benchmark with 7800X3D vs 7800X to see if cache helps in this specific case.

 

[Kenrou]

This is normal, it's an old graphics engine like WoW, and although somewhat updated it still relies mostly on 1-4 threads, and can't tell cores from HT/SMT which will lower performance in some situations.

 

[mackerel]

I did try HT off previously and it didn't help.

I just ran it on my 5800H CPU laptop. Same thing, kinda. On all the Intel CPUs I tried, thread 3 is 100% at times, but on the 5800H I'd eyeball and say 3+4 was hitting 100% still, but it wasn't on 3 only.

BTW I just realised I'm breaking convention if you ever used affinity in Windows. I'm counting threads as 1-CPUthreads, whereas Windows counts them as 0-(CPUthreads-1). So have an off-by-one error thrown in for free.

Edit: I'm aware the main game was somewhat single threaded, but maybe I was hoping too hard that with the graphical update they could spread the threads around a bit more.

 

[Kenrou]

Even WoW with DX12 is still kinda single threaded especially in heavily sharded/phased areas like big cities (FPS sinks like a rock no matter how powerful your system is), but the updates helped a lot in raids/pvp/big open areas with sometimes dozens/hundreds of spells/animations going off at the same time, I would assume about the same with FFXIV. Although to be fair i never really expected for these games to be fully "upgraded" to modern standards without a complete engine overhaul/upgrade, and even then...

 

[mackerel]

I was like, how does a 16 subscriber channel do this much testing? Looks like this is an established French channel (27k subs) that is branching out into English. Still they did the CPU testing and it looks like the advantage the 7800X3D has over the 7600 can't be explained only by clock differences. So the cache is probably helping there.

 

[Kenrou]

Yep, the cache is a huge help on draw call monsters like MMORPGs, not so much with single player games, although there are quite a few that show a huge difference from a 5800x to a 5800x3d for example. I caught a video a couple of months back exactly about this, I'll link here if I find it again.

 

[Rpkole]

So from the Live Letter this morning the benchmark was not working right and they are releasing a new version with the lighting and other things corrected.

 

[mackerel]

So from the Live Letter this morning the benchmark was not working right and they are releasing a new version with the lighting and other things corrected.

The benchmark update only applies to the character creator lighting. The benchmark itself I wouldn't expect to be significantly changed since that is created using the updated graphical content. It sounds like the other character detail updates are not final yet since they were asking for feedback on teeth for example. They might be implemented for launch.