Persistant Issue With Processor Performance.

Well, as I feared, the issue I was experiencing in the FFXIV beta is indeed present in the Retail. It's more than likely an issue with my hardware, but it's driving me insane, and any help, or even someone who can just tell me what is causing this, would be greatly appreciated.

Essentially, the game will flatline the Processor at 100% on both cores after a period of time. When this happens, the game becomes entirely unplayable, running at about 2FPS. It's definitely not a performance issue, at least on the surface. I can run the game quite well, even with something like Ambient Occulsion enabled, I also have a hard time believing the issue is related to insufficient hardware, because the problem can occur if I'm just sitting in the title screen for a about 15minutes. The only commonality seems to be time from startup.

==Specifications==

Windows XP Media Center Edition SP3. 32 bit
AMD AthlonX2 4200+ (2.2GHZ)
4GB Corsair XMS2 DDR2 RAM (PC6400)
EVGA Nvidia GeForce GTS250 1GB model

Did I miss anything important?

Again, even just knowing what the problem is, without even being able to fix it, will be greatly liberating. At this point, I'm just looking for closure, and not even a fix, that's how bad the situation is.

Your processer is the bottleneck here, with those specs if you wanna splash out i would reccomend upgrading it to an i7.

2.2GHz dual core is barely above the minimum processer specs.

I use a 2.7GHz dual core and it runs decent on minimum specs, if you get say an i7 2.7GHz+ you should beable to run it on highish specs, also it could be an idea looking into upgrading to windows 7, xp was nice in its time but its getting really old now and windows 7 is alot better imo

I use a 3.06GHz processor, and I've had no problems at all.

I have an i7 at 2.67GHz, and an HD4870, 9GB RAM and I can run at max with little to no issues at all..

Core i7 1.6GHz (forced to 2.67GHz via settings) HD5730, no problems so far outside of a little lag in cities. Near max settings, though I think I may bottleneck a bit because of the processor. :\

Probably an issue solely with your cpu, then again I'm not impartial towards AMD as I stopped buying them a long time ago because of various problems after a year of use.

First off, I greatly appreciate the responses so far, something is better than nothing.

While I have no doubts my processor is bottlenecking my total performance, this issue does not seem to be a "Your system sucks" Problem. As I said, the processor can lock out at 100% on both cores even during the title screen (The thing you can view the credits on/log in from) while in another session, I can look at a group of 40 people with nothing but a slight degradation in performance.

I am very keen on PC gaming, and I know what to expect from inadaquate hardware, this is not something that exhibits symptoms related to that, when the processor speed flatlines to 100%, there is no recovery, no fluctuation. Neither logging, nor looking at a wall, reduces the strain on the cores, as one would expect from a hardware bottleneck. The game also will not close normally at this point, the only way to exit is a Force-shutdown (Alt F4 or Task Manager). One core appears unable to release itself from FFXIV, maintaining a 100% core usage until I force the game out.


Normal operation has the processor cores bouncing between 90 and 70, but never flatlining to that 100%, and there is no performance based reason as why it would occur on the title screen.

I should also mention, this can happen on the boot system as well. If the problem happens on the boot, I get the wierd [][][][][][]FFXIV[][][][][][][] Error that requires restart.