FFXI Framerate On Gaming Laptop Terrible

Go into nvidia control panel -> Manage 3D Settings -> Select program (All Play-On-line Games) -> select the dedicated card under preferred graphics processor -> under 3, change power management mode to "Prefer Maximum Performance"

I had the same issue with mine. The dedicated card was detecting it as a game, but it wouldn't throttle past idle with FFXI running. This fix forces the card to run full speed while XI is active

If you are uncapping FPS with unlimited (which it seems you are), my laptop just despises it and will go all over the place, but stays at 29.4 without it (not even loaded from the start, if you turn off unlimited from within game, at least in my case, FPS flips out still). Try loading the game without unlimited, and turning off shadows/weather. Hopefully it will help. Trust me, I don't like going without unlimited when on my laptop, but I have zero issues without it.

I dont know if related, but my laptop was pretty bad at running ffxi. It was lagging each interval of time, and that single boxing. I thought that weird as that laptop is superior to my current one, but it has amd as video card and its 15.1' screen while my current is 14.

The resolution was totally better but it doesnt matter as it wasnt running properly.

I wonder if there is a solution.

Are you using an SSD by chance? I had an issue a few years back where FPS would dip at exact intervals, and it had something to do with something related to the SSD, but I can't recall what. Intel management engine or something of the like

Are you using Windows 8(.1)? I've never seen FFXI run properly on an 8.1 computer. Sometimes I see acceptable frame rates on certain computers (15-20+ avg. during fights), but that's rare.

This probably won't help you, but from what I understand about FFXI:

It's build on directx 8, and there hasn't been a video card in years which supports that directly, so what you end up with on newer machines is the CPU having to emulate what the GPU normally would handle, and on laptops, that typically is pretty resource intensive.

I have a newer laptop that runs FFXIV on normal settings pretty well, but absolutely can't run FFXI in any playable state without heating up like an oven. So I keep my old pc around just to play FFXI lol.

Hopefully one day we'll get an update that addresses this.

Had the same issue on my laptop, solved by resetting previous card drivers.

I've understood the problem as Windows 8 having poor pre-DX10 support. It doesn't take much Google-fu to see a variety of people having issues with Windows 8 and older games whether it's due to DX9.0, 9.0c, 8, Direct3D, DirectPlay, DirectDraw, or a variety of other DirectX-related woes.

I've had FFXI run like molasses on Win8.1 laptops (even when it was verified to be using the dedicated graphics card, which wouldn't matter because modern integrated cards are vastly overqualified for FFXI) but when Win7 was installed on a partition it ran absolutely perfectly.

I'd really love it if I could get unlimited working well enough to use even in crowded areas or events. The game looks so much better with 60fps but it's unplayable when fps starts dropping.

I've got 2 nvidia cards but before I switched I had 2 older ATI's and I still had the same issue.

I'd love to figure out how to stay above 55 on my set up. Most of my stuff is 'newish' but none of it is really new.

Running win7 myself. I can't really stand 8 despite that it would probably improve some games, this is the one I care most about.
I run both my game instances at 1920X1080. I honestly don't get much of a difference when running a single instance vs two. I figure the bottleneck is due to XI's inability to use multiple cores.
Processor AMD FX-8350 4.0ghz
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113284
Motherboard ASUS SABERTOOTH 990FX
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131877
Ram CORSAIR XMS3 DDR3 1600 I had 4 sticks of 2gb each but one died ; ; so now I only have 6gb total
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820145200
Graphics Two Nvidia GeForce GTX 680
Using Driver version 9.18.13.4709
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130794
Drive Samsung 830 256gb
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA0AJ0ZX6767&cm_re=MZ-7PC256D-_-20-147-164-_-Product

Now I use to have an older set of Radeon HD5830's but I had the same issue then so I'm not sure if the problem is my cards or not.

And my CPU can go up to 4.3ghz (and I have it set to idle at that much) so I know my cores are running fairly fast.

So I dunno. I haven't played enough after telling my nvidia settings to prefer maximum performance to know if it's helping much. I feel like it did, but I've only sat in PJ since then so I don't have much to base it off of. I'd like to leave my game settings as high as I can. I don't like to turn off weather and such but I guess if I can keep my FPS consistently higher then I may have to.

Unlikely. The drivers are currently up-to-date for both 7 and 8 yet 7 performs better. 8 will flounder with FFXI even on integrated graphics.

I've also heard that FFXI runs better on ATI/AMD cards than Nvidia generally, likely as a result of ATI having been the big thing in the early 2000s.

Here's some testing I've done to think over:
Laptop with:
i3 3110M, 2.4GHz, 4GB RAM, Intel HD 4000, Windows 8.1 - Settings have to be lowered to get a good framerate at 1366x768 (the laptop's resolution), but it runs FFXI pretty good (15-18FPS at high demand parts, 25+ otherwise generally)

i5 4200H, 2.8GHz, 8GB RAM, Intel HD 4600 (it runs with no difference on my nVidia GeForce GTX 860M) Windows 8.1 - Runs like crap at any resolution or setting. Lucky to see 15FPS just idling in an empty map.
With the above computer on Windows 7, though: Perfect 29.4FPS regularly, with rare drops to 25-28 if things are getting a bit intense.

To anyone having a problem with FFXI and you happen to use Windows 8 (any kind), please install Windows 7 as a dual-boot. You have 30 days to try stuff on Windows 7 before it pesters you for an activation key so you have plenty of time to test FFXI on it.

I don't think graphics cards (either integrated or dedicated) are at fault for most FFXI problems. I'm pretty sure the issue is Win8's poor support for pre-DX10. I've seen reports of DirectX 9 games having issues with Windows 8. FFXI uses DX8 which I've seen far too many reports of slowdown and general screwiness on Win8.

Some games have patches for Windows 8(.1) to help with poor DirectX/Direct3D/DirectDraw compatibility. I wonder if anything similar can be made for FFXI?

Just remember, a problem with FFXI being slow or something will basically never be your computer being too weak. It was designed to run on computers many times weaker as a result of being an old game, and I don't think it's required specs have changed over the years.