Building A New PC - Video Card Question

I'm looking into building or buying a customized PC to play FFXI, and I have a question about the Square Enix Compatibility Requirements with regards to the graphics cards.

With what research I've done so far, it seems that the versions of graphics cards on that page are no longer being offered by online stores (at least from what I've seen). My question is, are newer versions of Nvidia/AMD compatible with FFXI or do I need to try and track down one of the older cards specifically listed by SE?

An example of what I mean is, I'm seeing Nvidia GeForce GTX cards on sites, but they're newer versions than the 570/580 that SE has listed.

Thanks.

I've used both a 550ti and a 660 and they work great.

Then again FFXI will run in vmware, which I recommend if you multibox.

I used to have a GTX570 and it worked great with teh driver's recommended. I use a GTX780 now and with current drivers FFXI occasionaly (maybe once a day) crashs due to a drive crash.

Any new card will run the game perfectly fine. Problems usually lie in t he drivers. But you dhould have no issues.

Okay thanks for the info on that.


Crashes once a day? :o


With a new card installed, is it just a matter of finding older drivers that the game recognizes? Or is it something else?

No problem, I say it because if you use multiple accounts, it's a good way to assign a controller (or a usb keyboard/mouse combo) to a particular VM instance, so you could control the instance entirely separate, vmware player will suffice for this, which is free.

Is this what you've used? Nvidia GeForce GTX 550 Ti

that sounds more like the pc having a general driver problem rather than the driver specifically having a problem with ffxi, but then again we don't know for sure. i'm running an r9-280x with the latest drivers with no issues. (also recommend it since you're in the market for a new gpu, i believe it's one of the highest performance/cost ratio card atm)


always get newest drivers. what worked in old drivers will more than likely work in new drivers, while what didn't work in old drivers may work in new drivers.

Something like that yeah, was an Asus one. I believe you can get a prime order for a bettter card for about the same price anymore, it's an older card now.

I'm seeing a lot of different types of R9-280x versions. I'm not really looking to spend a ton of money on just the video card, but at the same time, I'd like to get a card I wont have to worry about upgrading for a while.


Aye, Prime is the way to go.

@op Grab a 760 and play all the games.

Yeah, the idea is to be able to get a card that's reasonably priced but also powerful enough to run other PC games as well. Which version/brand of 760 are you using?

yes, i understand that, and that's how most folks do it really, too expensive to always keep updated extreme high end components. i haven't looked recently but in your original post you mentioned the 70/80 series, i believe a few months ago those were going for at least $80+ more than the 280x. the r9-290 was something i also looked into as it had twice the ROPs than the 280x and i believe there was a rumor saying you can flash it to the 290x, but the companies caught on fast and upped the price for nearly double the price of the 280x. if you look at the benchmarks, quick google search leads to...

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7406/the-sapphire-r9-280x-toxic-review/3

where you'd see in general the 280x performs better than the 770 (while the 770 costs more)

but of course, it depends on your budget, it appears the 280x has gone up in price as well (i got mine for about 280 from a sale)

Nvidia GeForce GTX 580/570 seems to be the highest (and last) video card mentioned on their requirements page, so it's great to know that the list isn't the end-all for folks wanting newer card options.

That's a pretty nice card there in the review.

MSI's twin frozr 760 is your best bet

Nice card, and it happens to be on sale too. Actually, if that's really the list price, then that's a huge discount.

I have a GTX 760, it's been really good for me. I have the Asus one, looks like it's a little more expensive now than the others but it was the cheapest/most highly recommended at the time for the price range. http://www.logicalincrements.com/ can give you a good idea for upgrades and price for performance.

Nice, thanks for the link. The price point that the 760 is listed on the chart is way above what my budget would be for a new set-up. Does the 760 need to be in a tower with equally high-performing components?

It only happens with older games that are DX8 / 9 based. all new games my Drivers run all day without issue and never crash.

That same site has suggestions for similar level components which will work well together. Upgrading one thing alone will give you better performance but you will be limited by the other components at some point.

There's a link at the top for best builds and they have one for WoW which may be comparable and give you a better idea of what you want/need (varies with desired resolution, FPS etc. obviously this is for a different game but you can see how they score stuff). You will want to upgrade more than just your graphics card though if you want to use it fully and/or play other games too, but this level is far from necessary to play ffxi (but it is very smooth and pretty). I do not recall crashing in ffxi due to card/driver.

I still also use my high spec for 8 years ago PC for FFXI and don't run into many problems, but there are some occasionally. I can't find the spec for that saved anywhere though, sorry!

edit: how do you know the crash is related to the graphics card/drivers? I've had zero crashes I can put down to this, but maybe I'm not IDing them right? Only crashes I've had which I can recall have been windower related. That said they're far from common for me, I don't think I could stand playing where I crashed at least once a day.

No worries, I appreciate the info! Are you on Windows 7 or 8, btw?

Check this article out:


Best Graphics Cards For The Money: April 2014

meh, I always check the benchmark sites and decide my estimated price range and go from there.

I'm too much of a cheap *** to get the 100% the best, or SLI...

I'm on Windows 8 and have enjoyed using it a lot. There's a lot of people who don't like it though and it's going to be down to personal preference. You can find a lot of info about which you should get for what reason on the internet. I don't remember having any major compatibility issues (is that what you're asking for?), if I did then they were fixed quickly via info from the forums.

OP, what is your video card budget? That would help a lot.

There's an undetermined Windows 8 Bug for Windower that hasn't been isolated and it's not universal. At least there was, assuming there still is as I still seeing people have issues from time to time.

edit: iirc, it's a fatal error, the game won't even run.

Yeah, I have talked to folks about Windows 7 and 8 and have received varying responses. Most say go with Windows 7 and avoid 8, while others say they've had no problems at all with Windows 8.

I think part of the incompatibility concern was PlayOnline not working with Windows 8? I've been told the digital download versions of the Ultimate Seekers Edition has the new PlayOnline client built into the file.


Initially, this thread was really to double-check and make sure other video cards (newer) were compatible with FFXI, and not just what's on SE's compatibility page. So with that being said, I hadn't really thought about a budget. I do know that I'm probably not going to go over $300 for a card. Ideally though, I'd really like to spend less than that.

Thanks for this link. I'm browsing it as we speak. :D

The only recurring issue I currently have with windower as far as I'm aware is with unloading the Timers plugin. I haven't tried it recently though and I'm not sure if it is still reproducible etc., I just try to remember not to try and do that.

My previous post about not crashing was meant to be specifically about FFXI and graphics card/driver related crashes - I do have windower related crashes from time to time but nowhere near on a daily basis and it's usually my fault from playing with settings or loading/unloading and not random, sorry for the ambiguity.

edit: @Avalon, you do not need a high spec graphics card for ffxi, look for one that can run the other games you want to be able to play and then check compatibility with that for ffxi. I have a two year old laptop that can run ffxi well at 1080 using the onboard graphics card with an intel i3 cpu. If you buy any relatively new card you will probably be able to run on max settings without any worries.

I use an NVIDIA Geforce® GTX 660ti.

I actually got this graphics card so I could meet the recommended specs for FFXIV, which is ironic because I closed my FFXIV account after only a few days of playing.

The good news is, the card works very nicely for FFXI.