FFXI Screen Tearing

Like the title says, I get some serious screen tear when I play ffxi
Funny thing is, when I use vsync, the game becomes somewhat choppy and not smooth.

I get a constant 29.8 fps so Its not a GPU issue. Im running 2 750M's in sli.

I disabled the sli to see if that made a difference but it doesn't. Its not QoS or any other network related.

If anyone has some ideas let me know

Are you lagging or are you just concerned with 29.8 FPS? Because as mentioned FFXI caps at 30 FPS. The game does indeed use way more CPU than GPU.

I hope you didn't shell out money for those graphic capabilities with FFXI in mind.

lol nah I didnt buy the laptop just to play ffxi.

My CPU is an i5-4200M at 2.5GHz so I figure it would be ok to run an 11 year old game.

I dont't mind the FPS, thats fine, its just when I have vsync on, the FPS stays the same but the game becomes somewhat choppy. Every couple of seconds ill get microlag

But when I turn vsync off, the game is smooth but I get screen tear.

What I want to know is how to either get rid of the screen tear and not get microlag or use vsync and get rid of the microlag.

uninstall your video drivers then do a fresh driver install.

VSync will never look right because the framerate is capped at 30 (as others have mentioned). Maybe try disabling SLI for FFXI? (Haven't messed with NVidia SLI in a long time, but I know with AMD you can set application profiles to have specific settings for specific games).

A 750M not running in SLI should be more than enough to run the game at whatever settings you want.

Yea I tried disabling SLI too, screen tearing still persisted.

Because it is a CPU dependent game that pays no mind to multiple CPUs, have you tried switching which CPU the process is bound to? I had some fps lag issues at one point, while tri-boxing, that this remedied.

That said. Old game and they've barely cared how it's aged. It still works on the Japanese PS2 and that's the important part. ^^b d^^b d^^.

I wish the 30 fps cap would go away. Probably break the game. :(

Theres a download somewhere that lets you manually set ffxi's fps to 60, also has a uncapped version that's rather silly.

Edit: Found the download

If you set the game to run at 60 fps, it does look a tad off at first cause all the animations run alot faster. After looking at the slugish 30 fps game for 8 years than seeing it suddenly speed up it looked odd to me but i got used to it quick.
The uncapped fps however lol. With my set up it was running ffxi at nearly 240fps and it sped up the animation to the point of being stupid, looked like you were using flee while running but only going normal speed.

Will run a lot better on a older PC.

I suggest something like a 3Ghz Core Duo with a 2008-ish videocard.

I particularly run it in a AMD Athlon X2 4200 with a GTX280 and Windows XP. Worked great in another HDD with Windows 7 and the same hardware.

Unfortunately the main reason for all these issues is it relying on DX8.1 and newer cards using CPU for "translating" the API to a newer format the GPU can understand. That causes the graphics driver to consume a LOT of CPU power to perform the said translation. It gets to a point where the game starts to stutter.

Meanwhile, try enabling "graphics stabilization" on the offline settings menu (look for it on the POL icons under it's group at the start menu) and disabling shadows in the ingame settings.

OK so I tried meddling with the cores ffxi uses, screen tearing still happens.

I also tried uncapping the fps but the client keeps crashing when I run the executable sooo I don't know whats happening there. If I try to run it before ffxi is running it just tells me it cant find the ffxi pid sooo yea....

any ideas on getting the 60fps cap to work?

ok so i got it to work in borderless window.

I think ive isolated the problem but I still dont understand whats happening.

When I am in windowed mode with no vsync, I get the same microlag as if i had vsync on.

Is there any way to run the uncapper in full screen mode?

ok so i got the uncapper running in full screen mode but i still get some serious screen tearing (actually made it kinda worse haha)

Anyway I don't know what the problem could be.

Any more ideas?

Try downloading old drivers.

OMG I want to have your babies!

hmm still got nothing. Old drivers didnt work either which leads me to believe its not my GPU's that are messing with it.

Its gotta be something else but I don't know what else could cause screen tearing in full screen and micro stutter in windowed. Its really odd.

Tried that?

LOL no. My old pc can't even run chrome let alone a 3d game

Holy crap, looking at FFXI @ 60FPS is so weird! Weird, but pretty damn awesome I must say!

I was skeptical, but I see zero problems. Tested out while dualboxing to see if character movement was sketchy on the 30fps screen, but everything checks out! Looks great, I say give it a shot

kind of, it makes things look a lot smoother.

But dont hijack the thread lol, I dont want them to close it cuz I really need some help with this