Low FPS With GTX 980M

In the meantime anyone familiar with dgvoodoo2 know how to get this thing to run? i've tried dragging the dll and exe in the ffxi directory and having a folder in the ffxi directory and neither works. do i have to set up the instance folder to something else? it's linking to appdata/roaming now.

HUGE thanks to KURGANPRIME! dgvoodoo2 is working like a charm. Have to run it in a particular sequence but it works!!! Adoulin MH @ 50 fps (windower 30dps cap disbaled) with supersampling and everything maxed. Once again HUUUGE thanks to everyone that helped but for anyone that's in this situation, go the dgvoodoo2 route!

Just to add a "me too" here. I have had all sorts of problems since (around) December 2015. I have an Alienware M17xR3 laptop (specs here, not overclocked or anything) which I only use to play FFXI (and has Chrome on it but... yeah, not really much more installed). It was running Windows 7 fine for few years, then upgraded to the usual 8 -> 8.1 -> 10. I think I did the upgrade to 10 around October/November last year.

I have been applying all of Windows updates and NVidia driver updates as they become available (maybe this has been the error). Anyway, at around December 2015, FFXI started to run horribly slow, each time worse. At around January, I used to have 3-5 FPS when doing LS events; sometimes on zones when I was by myself I could get 20+, and very seldom go up to 29. I kinda forced myself to play less and less and lately I only logged in just for campaigns. I tried all sorts of things, monitored CPU adn GPU temperature as well and found they were hotter than usual. I decided to re-paste both GPU and CPU few weeks ago and after that the laptop fans seem to be working way less than before, so definitely there was some overheating + dust going on. On the first days after the repasting I saw some 29 FPS going now and then, and now events are more bearable but I am far from having an optimal experience that I had before December 2015. I turned shadows, weather and effects off without much luck.

In the last weeks it has worsen a bit: now I am experiencing these random crashes. I forgot to mention on the last months, whenever FFXI crashed I had a video driver crash message + sometimes a BSOD. Lately, after the repaste, I stopped having any driver crashed, but FFXI seems to crash randomly now and then. What I observed on the last days is that sometimes I don't crash alone and 2 or 3 of the LS members crash at the same time of me.

Today we were doing the new Ambuscade and whenever we went to Caedarva to re-get demon kills, I crashed always. I was directed to this thread by an LS mate and after unloading Guildwork I didn't seem to crash anymore (but only did 3 more runs). FPS are still sub-optimal, btw, around 15 FPS just standing in Mhaura but it can be the fact there are many people around.

Anyway, it is just a kind of "me too", "dunno what's happening" thread. It could very well be the laptop (but it isn't *that* old, only 4 years old) but I believe something changed since around December and I just can't play optimally again, like I used to do in the past.

Well I got voodoo to work but not with super sampling, always crashes on ffxi launched with super on.

are you making sure that the dgvoodoo2 is bypassing directx before launching pol and then enabling it again before launching the game?

i had that same issue but where it didn't hook but that was because i placed the dgvoodoo2 in the ffxi folder and not pol. Also just for troubleshooting make sure you tick "enable voodoo watermark" just to make sure it properly hooks.

keep us updated!

I think the moral of the story is to not buy Alienware.

What is your GPU usage @ when you launch it with dgvoodoo? i have msi afterburner launched and it hovers around 20-30% usage. idk if AW has any additional drivers set in place but i have a vbios flash on my sager (np8672). Also have the nvidia controller on maximum for all applications.

My laptop isn't alienware lots of laptops use optimus unfortunately.

Once thing i've noticed is that the controller no longer works if a window is opened on top of the game. I used to be able to move or control the game with wiki up briefly. I THINK i used to be able to do that... but it's been 4 years so ..idk lol

I have been having similar problems for the past months. It started in January.

The laptop restarts automatically when I 2-box(fans would be putting out alot of wind for some reason - I have 3 external fans placed under the laptop for cooling), Fps at 29.4 - things run smoothly, but sometimes it gets annoying when the laptop restarts on its own.

My laptop is a ALIENWARE M-17. I still havent been able to solve the problem, at first I thought it was a problem with my graphic card or Motherboard or whatever but after a BIOS SCAN and a anti-virus scan, everything was clean and 100% operational.

So any advice? Do you guys recommend the voodoo software that everyone is using?

Keep in mind Iam still using Windows 7.

Sounds like simple overheating.

Riktar, there's an option in the FFXI Config program in the gamepad setup to check a box to enable the gamepad to work in the background.

Alright I think i might have resolved my issue with the rainbows and missing textures.

I copied the D3DCompiler_43.dll to C:\Windows\SysWOW64

I downloaded this from the dgvoodoo website.

There was a D3DCompiler_47.dll in there already and i left it there.

It did not work at all when copying D3DCompiler_43.dll to the Playonline viewer directory, which is what is in the readme, it just kept crashing on startup.

I'm getting some intermittent random crashing which i will continue playing around with. Maybe its video ram sizes or textures compression etc not sure yet.

Almost there... getting excited... fps is up.