This may have come a bit late, but you will notice hardly any performance going from a 8800GT to a GTX460 or better in FFXIV. For one thing, it's heavily cpu oriented. A dual core at 3.0ghz isn't enough, and will bottleneck any card that's more powerful. I ran my x6800 at 3.2 ghz and had no performance increase upgrading to a gtx 460, until I went quad core. You'll get a much better increase going from a E8400 Core 2 Duo 3.0ghz to an i5-i7, or Q6600/Q9550 than upgrading your gpu.
On a side note, MSI/Gigabyte seem to fare better regarding GTX 460s, mostly because of the non-stock cooler. Evga is fine, although it runs noisy from what i've heard.
I have a GTX480 (1.5gb ddr5) and good solid system but I still encounter problems with this game. I think there was some threads around that mentioned problems with Nvidia drivers plus FFXIV doesn't seem to be optimized very well. If you want it to run well and stable you won't be using max settings.
BUT even without max settings it still looks good. You'll just have to play around with what works best for you.
Play: - Played: FFXIV, WAR, Allods, Aion, AoC, DDO, EQ2, GW, Lotro, Tabula Rasa, Vanguard, WoW
A GeForce GTX 460 should give a little over double the video performance of a GeForce 8800 GT. It's just a question of how much more video power the higher settings take.
Dude seriously dont even bother with either of those cards. If you have the budget jump right to a 470 or 480. I just grabbed an Asus gtx470 and wow....what a beast. Nividia designed these beasts to cope under alot of heat so dont worry what anyone else is saying about heat, just have good air flow through your case and your good. I'm at idle right now and my card is sitting at 39c. With 60-70% fan she sits at about 75-80c.
Extra hard drives, plural? I'm of the view that one hard drive is one too many. Having to put up with hard drives is the universe's way of punishing music and movie pirates. But even if you do need a hard drive, it's easy to get one with effectively infinite capacity for any legal use that a typical consumer might have.
A lot of people have at least a media drive for backup and media files. I myself have 4 SSDs and 2 additional drives, giving me around 4,5 TB... It depends on what you use your computer for, just playing a few games and surf the web doesn't need that much but there are other stuff that does.
As for legal, most of my junk is fan subbed Japanese Anime, the jap copyright only covers Japan so it is fine as long as no one copyrights it in EU or US.
I would still recommend the 480 even if the 1Gb 460 is at least acceptable.
And Nvidia also recently took about half a billion dollars in charges on their financial statements for unusual warranty payouts because parts that they said would be fine turned out not to be fine. The figure probably would have been a lot higher than that except that people who had parts die after the warranty expired often didn't know that they had chips that were systematically defective and probably could have gotten it covered.
Let's go over this again. GeForce 400 series cards and Radeon HD 5000 series cards are made on exactly the same TSMC 40 nm bulk silicon process. AMD was first to market with such cards, and put markedly better stock coolers on the reference cards than they had for future generations. They said that they had to because TSMC's 40 nm process doesn't handle high temperatures well.
And then Nvidia came along later, and set the TDP at 225 W for the GeForce GTX 470 and 250 W for the GeForce GTX 480, and designed reference coolers accordingly. Then they tried to bin the chips and saw that if they stuck to those TDPs, the GeForce GTX 470 would be slower than a Radeon HD 5850 and the GeForce GTX 480 would be slower than the Radeon HD 5870. So they clocked the chips higher, so that honest TDPs would put them around 250 W and 300 W respectively. But they didn't give them better coolers than what they had previously designed, as they were already built. So the cards get much hotter than intended.
So what does Nvidia do about it? They just claim it's not a problem, as it's working as intended. Just like they intended all along that they'd have to disable substantial parts of their top bin $4000 Tesla cards and $5000 Quadro cards. Right.
TSMC's 40 nm bulk silicon process is what it is, and long before Nvidia brought cards to market, AMD concluded that chips made on that process node didn't handle high temperatures well. Betting that Nvidia is right is betting that AMD wasted millions of dollars by giving their cards far better reference coolers than they had to, long before they knew what Nvidia's response would be. Considering that AMD has so far released 21 different cards (6 Radeon, 10 Mobility Radeon, 4 FirePro, 1 FireSteam) based on fully functional Evergreen GPUs while Nvidia has released 0 cards based on fully functional Fermi GPUs, do you really want to bet that Nvidia understands the process node better than AMD?
-----
But if you want higher performance than a GTX 460, you can get it without the unduly high temperatures. That's what a Radeon HD 5850 like I linked earlier is for, or a Radeon HD 5870. Or coming soon, a Radeon HD 6870. Or even a GeForce GTX 470 or 480 with non-reference coolers that are able to handle the cards, though those tend to be expensive enough to be a poor value as compared to AMD cards.
the benchmark kept crashing with an error screen ive read requirements my graphics card is barely below the minimum required, haha. I've ran other mmo's at lower then minimum specs not sure if this one will run tho.
the benchmark kept crashing with an error screen ive read requirements my graphics card is barely below the minimum required, haha. I've ran other mmo's at lower then minimum specs not sure if this one will run tho.
I would trust SE in this case. This game is pretty beastly.
Maybe try and snag a buddy key or wait for a trial.
i know right the game looks amazing. maybe i should wait for ps3 version at least specs wont be an issue then, at least last time i checked all ps3 are the same.. hah well ty for info.
I have a similar setup to the OP and decided against upgrading my video card. My CPU seemed to be the bottleneck, not the GT8800, and I didn't feel like replacing my motherboard just to get a better CPU so I could justify upgrading the video card.
What I did do, is get Windows 7 and an SSD disk dedicated to it, which was a cheap way to get the most out of what I had. The frame rates in FFXIV didn't improve much from the upgrade, but it removed all stutter while the OS was doing stuff in the background, so the game felt much smoother.
I ran the game at low resolution with settings at max, though. At higher resolutions, I guess the video card upgrade would be more noticable. Also, the OP has more RAM than I did, so having Vista running in the background may not have crippled his computer's performance as much as it did mine (though I'm fairly certain Vista uses more CPU time than Win7 for background processes, which is noticable on a dual core processor).
Never seen my OS (vista 64) use CPU over 10% and most of the time it is around 2%-7% and that would be on par with my last system and that was XP. I know it's easy to point fingers at Vista OS but I have never had a problem with it. I bet my CPU and ram have something to do with it and I am also sure Win 7 is more efficiant but as you just said upgrading to win 7 and a SS hard drive gave you little to no improvment.
Anyways when I did my benchmark test with the FFXIV tool I got 2900 for low settings and 1700 for high settings. If the weak point or bottle neck was the CPU then both tests would be closer to each other.
On another thought I did more research and found out that the GTX460 only needs a 450W power supply, so It looks like I'll be sending back the PSU I ordered from newegg.
On the PS3 version I have a feeling it's going to look bad, really bad on the PS3 a perfect example would be Maffia II, looks great on the PC and Xbox and looked like crap on the PS3.....
Vista 64, E8400 Core 2 Duo 3.0ghz, 8GB XMS2, EVGA Akimbo 8800GT 1GB DDR3
On another thought I did more research and found out that the GTX4600 only needs a 450W power supply, so It looks like I'll be sending back the PSU I ordered from newegg.
You need two 6-pin PCI-E power connectors, and most 450 W power supplies won't have that. You could use a 2x Molex -> 6-pin adapter, but don't get a cheap junk power supply and risk frying everything. If you want to save a bit of money on the power supply, you could try this:
Never seen my OS (vista 64) use CPU over 10% and most of the time it is around 2%-7% and that would be on par with my last system and that was XP. I know it's easy to point fingers at Vista OS but I have never had a problem with it. I bet my CPU and ram have something to do with it and I am also sure Win 7 is more efficiant but as you just said upgrading to win 7 and a SS hard drive gave you little to no improvment.
Anyways when I did my benchmark test with the FFXIV tool I got 2900 for low settings and 1700 for high settings. If the weak point or bottle neck was the CPU then both tests would be closer to each other.
On another thought I did more research and found out that the GTX4600 only needs a 450W power supply, so It looks like I'll be sending back the PSU I ordered from newegg.
On the PS3 version I have a feeling it's going to look bad, really bad on the PS3 a perfect example would be Maffia II, looks great on the PC and Xbox and looked like crap on the PS3.....
thats because the devs for mafia 2 dotn know how to use the ps3 hardware
#2 Go sell your RAM. Unless it's DDR3, which if it's at 8 it's not and the CPU definitely doesn't support triple channel, 8 GB is a huge waste of money.
#3 Just go buy a 5850 or a 470. Imo, the 5850 will last longer due to temps. Any card that runs higher than 70 on full load and is exposed to full load a lot (I'm looking at SC2 and Aion) will cause micro fractures. In short, cards that are known for high tempartures will die.
No idea who makes my PSU and I am not going to yank it just to find out.
Got my GTX 460 last night and its installed and working great! Man this card pumps out the heat compaired to my 8800GT! If this is the lower heat model for the 400 line then I would hate to see what the 480 heat temps are like. I tested my video card (GTX 460) with Crysis in DX10 mode with everything on High settings and 1920x1200 and it runs smooth as silk. I also tested Mafia II with highest setting phyx off and it played smooth as well. I never had a chance to test it on FF14 because I reinstalled Aion (everything on highest settings, 1920x1200, and 50-60fps) and after playing it for one day (before my new card arrived) I decieded that it was more fun, looked better, more polished, less frustrating to play than FF14 so I cancelled my account and uninstalled FF14.
I also did a DX11 benchmark with the Heaven Benchmark and here is what I got:
Got my GTX 460 last night and its installed and working great! Man this card pumps out the heat compaired to my 8800GT! If this is the lower heat model for the 400 line then I would hate to see what the 480 heat temps are like.
If you want the performance without as much heat, then that's what AMD cards are for. The GTX 460 isn't hot enough to be much of a problem unless you've got poor airflow or are rather sensitive to it, though. Try this for a heat problem:
Two GeForce GTX 480s in SLI resulted in a temperature of 103 F on top of the desk that the computer case was underneath. I repeat, that's not 103 F exhaust temperature. That's 103 F on top of the desk. The computer is underneath the desk, and presumably it's quite a bit hotter down there.
The real low heat models for the GeForce 400 line aren't out yet, though. Lower end cards produce less heat in exchange for less performance.
It's not that the card is getting hot it's my office My case has great air flow (Velocity Micro Tower) 2 big fans in front 120mm, 1 big fan in the rear 190mm, two fans on the PSU and very neat cables. The GTX 460 has external exhaust and at idle is super cool and I was just compairing it to my 8800GT and since the new card (GTX 460) is twice as powerful as the 8800GT it is normal.
I love this card! it's smaller, consumes less power than my older 8800GT and most importantly it' faster!
Vista 64, E8400 Core 2 Duo 3.0ghz, 8GB XMS2, EVGA Akimbo 8800GT 1GB DDR3
Comments
This may have come a bit late, but you will notice hardly any performance going from a 8800GT to a GTX460 or better in FFXIV. For one thing, it's heavily cpu oriented. A dual core at 3.0ghz isn't enough, and will bottleneck any card that's more powerful. I ran my x6800 at 3.2 ghz and had no performance increase upgrading to a gtx 460, until I went quad core. You'll get a much better increase going from a E8400 Core 2 Duo 3.0ghz to an i5-i7, or Q6600/Q9550 than upgrading your gpu.
On a side note, MSI/Gigabyte seem to fare better regarding GTX 460s, mostly because of the non-stock cooler. Evga is fine, although it runs noisy from what i've heard.
I have a GTX480 (1.5gb ddr5) and good solid system but I still encounter problems with this game. I think there was some threads around that mentioned problems with Nvidia drivers plus FFXIV doesn't seem to be optimized very well. If you want it to run well and stable you won't be using max settings.
BUT even without max settings it still looks good. You'll just have to play around with what works best for you.
Play: -
Played: FFXIV, WAR, Allods, Aion, AoC, DDO, EQ2, GW, Lotro, Tabula Rasa, Vanguard, WoW
I am playing on low settings @ 1920x1200 and that is on my 8800gt all I want is to be able to crank up the setting to medium-high and I will be happy.
Vista 64, E8400 Core 2 Duo 3.0ghz, 8GB XMS2, EVGA Akimbo 8800GT 1GB DDR3
A GeForce GTX 460 should give a little over double the video performance of a GeForce 8800 GT. It's just a question of how much more video power the higher settings take.
Dude seriously dont even bother with either of those cards. If you have the budget jump right to a 470 or 480. I just grabbed an Asus gtx470 and wow....what a beast. Nividia designed these beasts to cope under alot of heat so dont worry what anyone else is saying about heat, just have good air flow through your case and your good. I'm at idle right now and my card is sitting at 39c. With 60-70% fan she sits at about 75-80c.
Nividia states even 93c is acceptable.
A lot of people have at least a media drive for backup and media files. I myself have 4 SSDs and 2 additional drives, giving me around 4,5 TB... It depends on what you use your computer for, just playing a few games and surf the web doesn't need that much but there are other stuff that does.
As for legal, most of my junk is fan subbed Japanese Anime, the jap copyright only covers Japan so it is fine as long as no one copyrights it in EU or US.
I would still recommend the 480 even if the 1Gb 460 is at least acceptable.
And Nvidia also recently took about half a billion dollars in charges on their financial statements for unusual warranty payouts because parts that they said would be fine turned out not to be fine. The figure probably would have been a lot higher than that except that people who had parts die after the warranty expired often didn't know that they had chips that were systematically defective and probably could have gotten it covered.
Let's go over this again. GeForce 400 series cards and Radeon HD 5000 series cards are made on exactly the same TSMC 40 nm bulk silicon process. AMD was first to market with such cards, and put markedly better stock coolers on the reference cards than they had for future generations. They said that they had to because TSMC's 40 nm process doesn't handle high temperatures well.
And then Nvidia came along later, and set the TDP at 225 W for the GeForce GTX 470 and 250 W for the GeForce GTX 480, and designed reference coolers accordingly. Then they tried to bin the chips and saw that if they stuck to those TDPs, the GeForce GTX 470 would be slower than a Radeon HD 5850 and the GeForce GTX 480 would be slower than the Radeon HD 5870. So they clocked the chips higher, so that honest TDPs would put them around 250 W and 300 W respectively. But they didn't give them better coolers than what they had previously designed, as they were already built. So the cards get much hotter than intended.
So what does Nvidia do about it? They just claim it's not a problem, as it's working as intended. Just like they intended all along that they'd have to disable substantial parts of their top bin $4000 Tesla cards and $5000 Quadro cards. Right.
TSMC's 40 nm bulk silicon process is what it is, and long before Nvidia brought cards to market, AMD concluded that chips made on that process node didn't handle high temperatures well. Betting that Nvidia is right is betting that AMD wasted millions of dollars by giving their cards far better reference coolers than they had to, long before they knew what Nvidia's response would be. Considering that AMD has so far released 21 different cards (6 Radeon, 10 Mobility Radeon, 4 FirePro, 1 FireSteam) based on fully functional Evergreen GPUs while Nvidia has released 0 cards based on fully functional Fermi GPUs, do you really want to bet that Nvidia understands the process node better than AMD?
-----
But if you want higher performance than a GTX 460, you can get it without the unduly high temperatures. That's what a Radeon HD 5850 like I linked earlier is for, or a Radeon HD 5870. Or coming soon, a Radeon HD 6870. Or even a GeForce GTX 470 or 480 with non-reference coolers that are able to handle the cards, though those tend to be expensive enough to be a poor value as compared to AMD cards.
is a NVIDIA GeForce 9500 GT gonna be able to run this game at all?
I really like my Asus 5870 2gb. Though I have yet to see it's true potential realized.
You can see the minimum requirements here:
http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/#/about/game_info
Recommended system requirements:
http://www.finalfantasyxiv.com/media/recom/na/pc.html
And here is the official benchmark to see if you fall in the playable category:
http://www.finalfantasyxiv.com/media/benchmark/na/
the benchmark kept crashing with an error screen
ive read requirements my graphics card is barely below the minimum required, haha. I've ran other mmo's at lower then minimum specs not sure if this one will run tho.
I would trust SE in this case. This game is pretty beastly.
Maybe try and snag a buddy key or wait for a trial.
i know right the game looks amazing. maybe i should wait for ps3 version at least specs wont be an issue then, at least last time i checked all ps3 are the same.. hah well ty for info.
I have a similar setup to the OP and decided against upgrading my video card. My CPU seemed to be the bottleneck, not the GT8800, and I didn't feel like replacing my motherboard just to get a better CPU so I could justify upgrading the video card.
What I did do, is get Windows 7 and an SSD disk dedicated to it, which was a cheap way to get the most out of what I had. The frame rates in FFXIV didn't improve much from the upgrade, but it removed all stutter while the OS was doing stuff in the background, so the game felt much smoother.
I ran the game at low resolution with settings at max, though. At higher resolutions, I guess the video card upgrade would be more noticable. Also, the OP has more RAM than I did, so having Vista running in the background may not have crippled his computer's performance as much as it did mine (though I'm fairly certain Vista uses more CPU time than Win7 for background processes, which is noticable on a dual core processor).
Never seen my OS (vista 64) use CPU over 10% and most of the time it is around 2%-7% and that would be on par with my last system and that was XP. I know it's easy to point fingers at Vista OS but I have never had a problem with it. I bet my CPU and ram have something to do with it and I am also sure Win 7 is more efficiant but as you just said upgrading to win 7 and a SS hard drive gave you little to no improvment.
Anyways when I did my benchmark test with the FFXIV tool I got 2900 for low settings and 1700 for high settings. If the weak point or bottle neck was the CPU then both tests would be closer to each other.
On another thought I did more research and found out that the GTX460 only needs a 450W power supply, so It looks like I'll be sending back the PSU I ordered from newegg.
On the PS3 version I have a feeling it's going to look bad, really bad on the PS3 a perfect example would be Maffia II, looks great on the PC and Xbox and looked like crap on the PS3.....
Vista 64, E8400 Core 2 Duo 3.0ghz, 8GB XMS2, EVGA Akimbo 8800GT 1GB DDR3
You need two 6-pin PCI-E power connectors, and most 450 W power supplies won't have that. You could use a 2x Molex -> 6-pin adapter, but don't get a cheap junk power supply and risk frying everything. If you want to save a bit of money on the power supply, you could try this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817151094
That might not save any money after a restocking fee, though, and it's probably not quite as nice the one you got. It's still very good, though.
thats because the devs for mafia 2 dotn know how to use the ps3 hardware
Thanks my current PSU will work for what I need and I have one 6pin connector and two 4 pin molex connectors so I am golden
Vista 64, E8400 Core 2 Duo 3.0ghz, 8GB XMS2, EVGA Akimbo 8800GT 1GB DDR3
#1 Upgrade your OS (piratebay is your friend)
#2 Go sell your RAM. Unless it's DDR3, which if it's at 8 it's not and the CPU definitely doesn't support triple channel, 8 GB is a huge waste of money.
#3 Just go buy a 5850 or a 470. Imo, the 5850 will last longer due to temps. Any card that runs higher than 70 on full load and is exposed to full load a lot (I'm looking at SC2 and Aion) will cause micro fractures. In short, cards that are known for high tempartures will die.
Your welcome.
What's your current power supply? Give the brand name and model, not just the nominal wattage.
No idea who makes my PSU and I am not going to yank it just to find out.
Got my GTX 460 last night and its installed and working great! Man this card pumps out the heat compaired to my 8800GT! If this is the lower heat model for the 400 line then I would hate to see what the 480 heat temps are like. I tested my video card (GTX 460) with Crysis in DX10 mode with everything on High settings and 1920x1200 and it runs smooth as silk. I also tested Mafia II with highest setting phyx off and it played smooth as well. I never had a chance to test it on FF14 because I reinstalled Aion (everything on highest settings, 1920x1200, and 50-60fps) and after playing it for one day (before my new card arrived) I decieded that it was more fun, looked better, more polished, less frustrating to play than FF14 so I cancelled my account and uninstalled FF14.
I also did a DX11 benchmark with the Heaven Benchmark and here is what I got:
Heaven Benchmark v2.1
FPS:
30.3
Scores:
764
Min FPS:
2.3
Max FPS:
68.8
Hardware
Binary:
Windows 32bit Visual C++ 1500 Release May 21 2010
Operating system:
Windows Vista (build 6002, Service Pack 2) 64bit
CPU model:
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E8400 @ 3.00GHz
CPU flags:
2999MHz MMX SSE SSE2 SSE3 SSSE3 SSE41 HTT
GPU model:
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 8.17.12.5896 1024Mb
Settings
Render:
direct3d11
Mode:
1920x1200 fullscreen
Shaders:
high
Textures:
high
Filter:
trilinear
Anisotropy:
4x
Occlusion:
enabled
Refraction:
enabled
Volumetric:
enabled
Replication:
disabled
Tessellation:
normal
Unigine Corp. © 2005-2010
I am happy with the test results and I am glad I purchassed this card. Thanks for the advice and steering me in the right direction.
Vista 64, E8400 Core 2 Duo 3.0ghz, 8GB XMS2, EVGA Akimbo 8800GT 1GB DDR3
If you want the performance without as much heat, then that's what AMD cards are for. The GTX 460 isn't hot enough to be much of a problem unless you've got poor airflow or are rather sensitive to it, though. Try this for a heat problem:
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2010/09/30/my_quiet_galaxy_geforce_gtx_480_sli_build
Two GeForce GTX 480s in SLI resulted in a temperature of 103 F on top of the desk that the computer case was underneath. I repeat, that's not 103 F exhaust temperature. That's 103 F on top of the desk. The computer is underneath the desk, and presumably it's quite a bit hotter down there.
The real low heat models for the GeForce 400 line aren't out yet, though. Lower end cards produce less heat in exchange for less performance.
It's not that the card is getting hot it's my office
My case has great air flow (Velocity Micro Tower) 2 big fans in front 120mm, 1 big fan in the rear 190mm, two fans on the PSU and very neat cables. The GTX 460 has external exhaust and at idle is super cool and I was just compairing it to my 8800GT and since the new card (GTX 460) is twice as powerful as the 8800GT it is normal.
I love this card! it's smaller, consumes less power than my older 8800GT and most importantly it' faster!
Vista 64, E8400 Core 2 Duo 3.0ghz, 8GB XMS2, EVGA Akimbo 8800GT 1GB DDR3