Wanted: Info On Cores/thread Impact On Game

Hello All

In another post, I was told that my laptop got a low score in Vana'diel Bench 3 because its i3 380M CPU had "pathetic" cores. I was hoping to get some detailed info on how today's modern CPU's, with their more evolved threads and cores have a positive impact on the game.

Laptop's specs:
Toshiba Satellite A665-S5170
First generation Intel Core i3 380M @2.53GHz – Arrandale 32nm
Windows 10 Professional
Inland Professional 240Gb 3D TLC NAND SATA III SSD
4.00Gb DDR3 RAM @ 1,066MHz (7-7-7-20)
Intel HD Graphics, Revision 2
Benchmark Score: 2,627

https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4pjtim/eli5_someone_explain_cpu_cores_to_me/

It has nothing to do with how many cores your CPU has, your machine is 11 years old and a laptop on top of that. Even running a desktop from 11 years ago would be 100% upgrade.

Running even a very low end desktop from the current generation (100 USD ryzen desktop chip) with the cheapest GPU (120-170 USD) would smash it in a bench mark. It also has slow and little total ram below what you should even be running windows 10 ideally on at this point. That it shares with slow old integrated GPU what means it shares the already slow/little RAM in a single channel to produce 3D renders.

People have a hard time understanding that the clocks/cores on CPU the way they are sold and marketed to the public have less of a impact than the over all architecture of said system. Even if you built the highest end system it would age out in 7 years at the longest probably less for a laptop and be nothing more than a youtube machine at best. While it takes little effort for any pc in the last 15 years to run FFXI the overhead from the OS and things like Chrome all have advanced even if FFXI has not.

Some laptops video cards don't recognize ffxi, this causes severe fps issues cause it's not running thorough it. You can get programs to fix this.

Most of the issues (if it's not the above one) are going to be due to modern video card drivers not taking ffxi into account and so not properly rendering the game. I bought a new computer 5-6 years ago and had crazy fps issues with ffxi, when a far older computer had none. I searched for older drivers, installed them and ffxi ran perfectly.

The problem is, as we go on it becomes harder to find drivers that take ffxi into account at all. Nvidia or whoever programs the drivers does not take archaic systems used by the ffxi engine into account. This is why you can get a computer that can run the latest AAA title flawlessly but slows down to 15 fps around bard songs or whatever, the drivers don't properly handle the effects cause it wasn't programmed to do so. So when it comes across these unsupported effects from 20 years ago it just stalls out.

Using dgVoodoo2 resolves the video card drivers issue and it's not so much about the drivers "not recognizing FFXI" as is the Graphics Pipeline not liking DirectX8 which is the language of FFXI.

DX8 and even DX9 has been deprecated for awhile now and nothing modern or recent supports it anymore. What little support does exist is in the form of barebones emulation which is designed for backwards compatibility and not performance. With each subsequent generation of graphics cards the performance deficiency will keep growing. What dgVoodoo2 does is intercept the DX8 calls from the program and rewrite them as DX11 calls which all modern systems understand and have optimizations for. This bypasses the OS and Graphics drivers slow legacy compatibility layer. The downside is that not all DX8 programs will work right and many special tunings have to be done, which the author of dgVoodoo2 is constantly doing. This program is used frequently by the retro gaming community to play older games on modern systems and FFXI now qualifies as an "older game".

As to OP's post, we could probably make that notebook run FFXI but not remotely well. The graphics chip on there is an ancient Intel HD Graphics which were notoriously bad performers on anything involving "3D". The CPU itself could probably suffice with the limited 1366x768 resolution but the graphics rendering would hold everything else back.

Its amusing how commonly used is Dgvoodoo.

How can SE keep a product that cant perform well with a normal computer? At least, they should develop a solution by themselves than relying on someone else to create and distributed third party tool.

And what about the "purists"? Do they play with a game lagging anytime an animation starts to kick?

Well as I said dgVoodoo2 is used heavily in the retro gaming community to play older titles on modern systems.

http://dege.freeweb.hu/Gallery/DXGamesGallery.html

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/DgVoodoo_2


https://www.vogons.org/viewforum.php?f=59

The author is currently working on a DX12 version so that we can continue playing our old games on newer hardware.

Currently I'm using it for about a dozen different games that FFXI is just one of. We really can't expect companies to put out the considerable expenditure it takes to code their entire game into a new platform / engine, which is what almost all these games would require. In theory backwards compatibility is the responsibility of Microsoft and the graphics card manufactures, in reality they do make a best effort attempt but performance optimizations for old graphics architectures isn't very high on their priority list. Stuff like that is where the community steps in and takes care of it's own.

While I don't disagree, I think there's also something to the notion that it'd be appropriate for a currently "active" title like FFXI to have some developer efforts to keep it running smoothly. SE could integrate something slimmer, akin to some of the other shims used for FFXI, for instance. Wouldn't be as good as updating the engine, but it'd work better out of the box for a lot of people...which was a supposed focus for the dev team last year.

That said, far as I've seen, FFXI has continued to be functional on discrete cards. The primary problem seems to be Intel's legacy support, or lack thereof (extends to Optimus as technically that runs "through" the Intel GPU at all times).

Yeah functional is about the best we can expect from the developers of FFXI. It'll run it just won't run pretty and why the community developed a separate solution to make it not only run better but also look way prettier.

I had....have the same laptop and it worked fine for XI up until I quit in March of 2013. Not sure if it would still do well due to age/wear and advancements made in XI today.

When I bought it, I was told it would run FFXI, but not run it well and the guy pointed me to a $1200 laptop instead. I bought this one anyway and it became my main FFXI machine because a toaster is better than the PS2 I was playing on prior.

This phrase is dangerous and subjective. For most people my VMs would run the game "fine" and a perfectly acceptable solution (and for crafting, soloing, missions, quests (most), and bazaaring, or general RPing they would be correct. They're still a horrible experience for anyone trying to do proper content and I wouldn't recommend it. (note: my vms are ancient and on ancient hardware, not saying all are incapable).

In 2020 you'd want this:

just for windows:
i3 or better
ssd (probably 256 or more, as storage is cheap)
win10 (pro if you can pull it)

now for XI:
a dedicated gpu (and probably dgvoodoo or alternative if a laptop)
if laptop, a fullsized keyboard

Yeah, I need to get a new Laptop when I get to work (damn you Corona) to hold me over till I can build a desktop.

Would a 2015 mid to high end range GPU differ in performance with today's latest high-end GPUs for FF11, considering DGVoodoo is used in both cases, would there be any noticeable difference making it worth upgrading?

I know from research and personal experience that 60 FPS in dense areas with 18 players or more will always suffer degraded performance vs 30 FPS due to the nature of the code, so I don't really have my hopes up in that area, and hence why I still use 30 FPS. However if there was a major improvement in the 30 FPS performance, it may then be worth upgrading.

I would postulate that one or both of these is true, as I cannot test:

Depends on settings

Probably no difference until dx12 is supported.