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Unlimited
 Bahamut.Odaru
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By Bahamut.Odaru 2014-10-23 20:41:38
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Sometimes, when a lot is going on onscreen, this plugin actually kills FPS for me, making everything move in super slow motion. Has anyone else experienced this/have any suggestions on how to fix/what could be causing it? Thanks!
 Lakshmi.Neboh
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By Lakshmi.Neboh 2014-10-23 22:03:35
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I would assume it would depend on the specs of your PC?
 Bahamut.Odaru
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By Bahamut.Odaru 2014-10-23 22:20:56
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I'm using an NVIDIA GTX660, the game runs flawlessly, along with other games that are much more demanding.
 Odin.Jassik
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By Odin.Jassik 2014-10-23 22:26:59
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GTX750ti and I have the same issue from time to time. I'm leaning toward it being an Nvidia conflict at this point.
 Ragnarok.Sekundes
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By Ragnarok.Sekundes 2014-10-23 23:29:38
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I've got an old as *** pair of radeon cards in crossfire and I get it too. Granted, I don't really know how much your graphics card matters. XI doesn't use them to their full extent and it can only use a single processor core so there's plenty of bottlenecks for frame rate to dip. I should also mention I have only about an hour of experience with the plug in. When the frame rate is good the game looks so smooth but I feel like I'm running through jelly when it drops. It doesn't even skip really, just goes all slow-mo.
 Odin.Jassik
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By Odin.Jassik 2014-10-23 23:34:44
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I should note, the frame rate never actually drops, it stays pegged at 56 fps, the animations just move at a slower pace. Enough so you can separate the portion of animations that are tied to your character and the mob.
 Lakshmi.Neboh
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By Lakshmi.Neboh 2014-10-24 00:04:42
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I have witnesses this also occasionally with it on. I left it off for events that have a lot of action going on myself.
 Bismarck.Snprphnx
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By Bismarck.Snprphnx 2014-10-24 00:04:51
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I have noticed at 60fps it seems im running in slow-mo, and with uncapped it looks like my char is running super fast. animation wise, not actually running faster.
 Leviathan.Arcon
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By Leviathan.Arcon 2014-10-24 01:55:02
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The actual movement, casting or combat speed is never faster or slower than it would be without this plugin, only the animations may look like that. If the game cannot render the screen at 60 FPS the animation will slow down, so even if you only see an FPS drop of 5 to 55 FPS you will already see the animation slow down. There's no video card conflict, this is just the dumb way SE made animations frame dependent and is not something we can fix. It's very noticeable when uncapping FPS entirely, less so with 60 FPS but still present.

And just because you can run newer games at 60 FPS or higher constantly does not mean it will work for FFXI. It has nothing to do with being old as much as it has to do with being very unoptimized, that's why it still cannot keep up with modern games in terms of efficiency. And on top of being unoptimized SE does some really expensive hacks to achieve certain effects (like the avatar glow or conflux animations) which only add onto the pile of CPU hungry algorithms this game has to churn every frame.

tl;dr not a bug, cannot fix.
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By Santi 2014-10-24 02:39:33
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Is it possible to have a plugin or addon that allows us to toggle avatar/conflux glows/geo bubbles on/off?
 Ragnarok.Martel
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By Ragnarok.Martel 2014-10-24 04:03:21
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Leviathan.Arcon said: »
The actual movement, casting or combat speed is never faster or slower than it would be without this plugin, only the animations may look like that. If the game cannot render the screen at 60 FPS the animation will slow down, so even if you only see an FPS drop of 5 to 55 FPS you will already see the animation slow down. There's no video card conflict, this is just the dumb way SE made animations frame dependent and is not something we can fix. It's very noticeable when uncapping FPS entirely, less so with 60 FPS but still present.

And just because you can run newer games at 60 FPS or higher constantly does not mean it will work for FFXI. It has nothing to do with being old as much as it has to do with being very unoptimized, that's why it still cannot keep up with modern games in terms of efficiency. And on top of being unoptimized SE does some really expensive hacks to achieve certain effects (like the avatar glow or conflux animations) which only add onto the pile of CPU hungry algorithms this game has to churn every frame.

tl;dr not a bug, cannot fix.
I so wish we could though. Or that SE would get off their *** and update some of this crap, somehow.

I love using unlimited. Feels like I'm playing a different game. Everything seems so smooth. Until I go into a major town, or things get busy in a fight. Then it feels like I'm playing in jerky slow-motion. ; ;
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By wormfeeder 2014-10-24 07:05:30
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Try setting the affinity of your game to use one core of your processor. You can set it in the properties of your executable.unless of course square\enix made ffxi multithreaded.
 Bismarck.Snprphnx
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By Bismarck.Snprphnx 2014-10-24 07:45:34
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Santi said: »
Is it possible to have a plugin or addon that allows us to toggle avatar/conflux glows/geo bubbles on/off?

Avatar auras and concluded glows are part of the .dat files, so you can't just turn them on/off. You can download alternate .dats without the glowing effect built in, however.

And a few months ago, SE said they were going to add a filter for the GEO bubbles. As far as I know, this has yet to happen, though.
 Ragnarok.Martel
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By Ragnarok.Martel 2014-10-24 08:27:56
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wormfeeder said: »
Try setting the affinity of your game to use one core of your processor. You can set it in the properties of your executable.unless of course square\enix made ffxi multithreaded.
I did try that actually. It didn't seem to help noticeably.

However, I am still interested in how to apply the change regularly via .exe. I just set it using the task manager when I tried it.
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By Iryoku 2014-10-24 20:46:31
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Setting the process's CPU affinity is generally a bad idea, and will usually hurt performance more than it will help. The OS is still going to preempt you to run other tasks, so you're not going to avoid context switches. But now, since you've told the OS that you only want to run on a single core, the OS can't schedule you to run on another core. You have to wait in line while the other threads get a chance to run.

The actual cost of context switches is difficult to quantify, but they're typically on the order of 1-3 µs. The cost of switching cores will likely be well under half of that. Of course, this is completely ignoring the fact that any switch (regardless of which core you end up on) is likely going to pollute the cache, and that is going to hurt performance a lot more than the switch itself. And all of this is much less than the time wasted waiting for other threads.

The only reason you should ever set the CPU affinity is when accessing a highly core-dependent feature such as the RDTSC or CPUID instructions, and then you should only leave the affinity mask set as long as necessary.

TL;DR: Don't set the process CPU affinity if you care about performance, you're only hurting yourself.
[+]
 Lakshmi.Zerowone
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By Lakshmi.Zerowone 2014-10-24 21:23:55
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animations are slow, the camera/3depth is amazing... i need to use a speed enhancement to enjoy it. My only grip.