video card recomendations : FFXI General Discussions

Well im ready to up my video card, and i know ffxi is picky (geforce and raedon) anyone know if other highend cards work or can recomend a better/best card for ffxi?
edit: currently useing radeon 9800 pro

I have a GeForce 6800GT and it's defenitely better than my old ati9700pro, I got about twice as good framerate. It does however slug down noticeably when you enable high detailed shadows in crowded places.

To get a noticeable performance increase you'd have to upgrade to ati X800/X850 or GeForce 6800 or higher and unless you have $400 or so lying around and also play games like doom 3 and/or half-life 2 it's not really worth it. Sure the game looks a little better but it's not really noticeable until you do dynamis and similar multi alliance stuff.


(Btw, a good guide to ati vs nvidia. Ati is faster but nvidia has better and more stable drivers. I picked nvidia this upgrade round and I'm VERY satisfied with it.)

Ive had many different video cards, both ATI and NVidia, and I've come to the conclusion that...

Nvidia = High framerates and poor graphic quality.

ATI = Decent Framerates and Great Graphic Quality.



I have an x800 atm and I absolutley love it, and have since i've had it.

5200 FX e-GeForce FX 256MB DDR AGP with the driver that Windows Xp finds for it.

I have not had one problem with it. I really dont care how it looks as long as it better than the PS2 graphics. PS2 Graphics SUCK compared to the PC ones .

Its not the greatest card by far but it lets me play with Decent Graphics and only cost me about 150$ when i baught it.

Anything as long as is better than the BLUR of my PS2. I use the PS 2 to fish or when formatting the comp other than that I avoid it .

I can't stand the PS2 graphics after seeing the game in the PC. It also makes my PC look chubby. <.<

Great. Thanks all. I'm looking to up the frame rate mostly, Quality is fine atm.. suppose i should have mentioned that..anyways i think ill try out the x800 or x850. In process of building a new pc so i want to get most out of it. Getting into more of the HNM's and dynamis so ill go speed over quality, Thanks again.^^

Framerate in FFXI "caps" @ 30 fps.

This doesn't mean that "anything will do", but you must bear in mind that not only the graphics card matters when it comes to things like dynamis or tiamat fight.

A couple of WD Raptor's in Raid 0 properly defragmented and two 512 Mb quality RAM sticks in dual channel will do for you as much as the graphics card.

When budgetting you new rig don't go OTT with the GPU and then buy whichever "value" harddrive and memory you can find.

Just my 2 cents.

We'll just following up. I ended up makeig a new pc altogether went with
Asus mobo P5GDC deluxe
Dual maxtor 16mb cashe 250 gig sata hdd's
Ati X700 pro pci-e card
P4 3.2 gig w/HT processor
runs beautifully. Almost went AMD but im waiting to see how the new dual core intel works out.
Any way thanks again for the info.

P4 w/HT 2.8GHz
320GB Maxtor
40GB Maxtor
1GB PC3200 ram
GeForce 6600GT 128MB

Then you will have a nice computer. Almost like mine.

I can't see FFXI being that needy a game when it comes to video resources. I'm using a ATI 9800XT 256MB. Even under dyanimis it works great. I could see room for upgrade but from there you would have to buy a bunch of new parts.

9800XT --> upgrade to PCI-Ex16 --> would need new MB to do this also
getting new MB --> might as well get one that accepts DDR2 and newest CPU
- CPU $200+
- DDR2 1GB $200+
- MB $100+
- Videocard $200+
(prices fluctate daily and these are just low estimates ... i know you can go much higher)

Also, make sure your video bus can handle the bandwidth your video card is able to put out. I have heard way to many people bash a video card, when its their MB/RAM or their overclocking skills that suck, that is the problem. Too many people overclock without knowing more than increase clock speed of the CPU. Better make sure your timing of memory is correct for both MB and Video card or else even a 500MHz increase in CPU clock speed can decrease your performance.