FFXI Suddenly Stuttering

Hi all,

I have read a ton of topics this morning about this and tried a bunch of things to fix it and I am at a loss/kinda losing my ***.

I played last night and the game was fine. Today, every 1-3 seconds I have a stutter step type of thing going on, even when I spin my camera around its like the game freezes up for a split second every few seconds and then continues on. It's borderline unplayable this way. I even notice it on the character select screen.



I don't have the FindAll addon downloaded or loaded when I am using windower.
Happens with and without windower.
Turned off QoS Packet Scheduler in my wifi adapter settings.
Tried setting affinity to 1 core.
Turned off firewalls/antivirus.
System restore to prior the current version update of FFXI.
Rolled back driver on my GPU.

Any help would be appreciated because I am borderline raging out at this point >;(

I am willing to try to uninstall/reinstall everything FFXI related if I have to, but if I do that and still have the issue my head might explode.

Do you happen to have a controller installed on your system? I used to play with an Xbox 360 controller and if I'd start the game without having the controller connected, it'd do exactly that.

Sorry forgot to mention that...nope no controller and gamepad is not enabled.

Are you using that "equipviewer" plugin? I had to stop using that one, as good as it was, as it kept lagging me out every 3-5 seconds. It got so annoying, I deleted it.

Also, are you using any dgvoodoo upgrades?

No equip viewer and don't use dgvoodoo either.

No idea :(

Have you tried rolling back your system on windows to a previous build, perhaps about a week ago? Sometimes windows updates overnight and makes small changes to your PCs performance, and it affects your game in minor ways. I have a nagging issue where at any given time where there is too much action going on the screen, it suddenly freezes and I have to use ctrl+alt+del to close via task manager. Happens 1-2 times per night, but does not happen ever on my crappy laptop, and can't figure out why. A LS member of mine told me to adjust to a "Windows 7 Compatibility" version to pair with the game, but it still persists.

I would try something like that before doing a full re-install. But if nothing else fails, If you have the time and want to get to the root cause, I would do a full re-install, perhaps of windows and then ffxi and gradually add things to the game (ashita, windower, xiview, etc) and see if it occurs. That, of course, is a drastic solution that you may not be interested in doing right now.

@Buukki I did do a system restore to 2 weeks ago actually and the issue persisted, its the current build I am on now actually.


I had a pending windows update, which I just did and rebooted (even though I have rebooted several times up to this point) and the stutter is gone.


What. the actual. ***.

I have an Intel i7 8700k and that kernel *** they push into my system every update was causing the same thing for me. It ended up being a process Antimaleware Service Executable. This is a security that is supposed to run when the CPU is idle, but it was grabbing 60-70% of my CPU resources while I was playing FFXI (dualbox 60fps and 144ghz). Had to do a bunch of online suggestions for work arounds to remove it, but I finally did.

I wouldn't have guessed it was CPU related (considering the power of my PC) but I had my fans set to thermal coloring and they kept turning red so I knew something was up. I'm full liquid cooled too.

I had an issue like, this, it only went away when I installed dgvoodoo.

It’s the Russians