Hitler's FFXIV ARR Early Access Experience

Ascy posted a link on where to make your own Downfall parody (http://downfall.jfedor.org/create/), where Hitler flips outs. I decided to make one showing how he reacts to FFXIV ARR Early Access.

FFXIV Open Beta

Freaking 3102...

That's how a good portion of my phase 4 went. Sat night around 9 PM I got booted and was not able to log in until Mon after maintenance, 12:30 AM. I stayed up so I could log in and get myself to an inn, even though I had work in the morning.

Unfortunately I had forgotten to load Fraps, so the whole time I was thinking I was taking screenshots, I really wasn't :(

But after I logged on after maintenance, I took a couple screens using the in game screen capture. The horrible 5+ second lag is gone!!!! However, there seems to be a built-in cooldown that prevents you from taking screenshots too quickly. Thanks to Aque for posting how to further maximize the HUD space by resizing the UI elements. http://aquelia.wordpress.com/2013/08/16/ffxiv-a-realm-reborn-ui-and-hud-scaling-guide/

4800x900 AMD Eyefinity mode. Using 3x Dell U2312HM

HUD with Eyefinity. I definitely prefer 3x1 setup in landscape vs 3x1 setup in portrait mode

For comparison, in phase 3 I went with 3x1 portrait 2700x1600. Although the screenshot doesn't show, the monitor bezels are very noticeable while in this mode, and I would not recommend it.

Here's hoping that next weekend will not see any server problems. Won't be beta anymore, so I'd be really upset if 3102 shows it's ugly face again. All-the-same, I don't wanna see 90000 or any other major login errors.

Adventures in Laptop Hybrid Graphics

Getting hybrid graphics to work on a laptop isn't the most intuitive thing to do. I found this out the hard way when I tried running FFXIV benchmark on my laptop containing a built-in Intel HD 4000 and a discrete AMD Radeon HD 7730M.

I've had my laptop for a months now, but have never seriously tried playing games on it. I ran Diablo 3 a couple times, but only for a brief amount of time. In Diablo 3, the settings do not tell you what GPU you're running at that moment, so I'd assume it was switching to the discrete card and never thought anything of it. That changed when FFXIV benchmark 2.0 came out, and I started to question which GPU  was being used.

When you launch the benchmark, it displays your system specs and for me, it was displaying my Intel HD  4000 instead of my Radeon HD 7730M. There wasn't even an option to select the 7730M, as if it didn't exist.

The combo box only lists the HD 4000

But I'm POSITIVE my laptop has a Radeon HD 7730M

DirectX Diagnostic was displaying the HD 4000 too. WTH!

This got me uber paranoid that something was up and my laptop wasn't working the way I thought it should. I started to do some research and sure enough, a Google search showed that others had similar problems with their hybrid setups. However, based on the make and model of the laptop and type of discrete graphics, there were solutions, and they varied. 

I started to experiment with the different methods and none of them seemed to work for me. Benchmark and dxdiag were still both telling me "Screw you! You don't have discrete graphics!" AMD drivers wouldn't install and kept saying they were not compatible with my setup. So I decided to force install the drivers anyways using a round-about method. That didn't work and made things worse. Every time it booted up, the screen flickered between a black and gray screen and never got into Windows.

After a few hours of getting rid of the drivers and doing Windows reinstall, I was back to square one. At this point I was exhausted and decided to just run the benchmark anyways. One of the things I read was that even though settings only shows the HD 4000, if the AMD Catalyst Control Center is configured correctly, the program should use the correct GPU. I've tried almost all other options, why not. So I made sure that the Switchable Graphics settings were set.

Option to control switchable graphics

Set all benchmark related executables to High Performance. Apparently the benchmark launches 4 different .exe files

I ran the benchmark and got the results. They seemed pretty decent for a laptop setup, giving me a warm and fuzzy that maybe the 7730M was being used. I then changed the CCC settings to use the HD 4000 and reran the benchmark.

Score of "Very High" although the graphics detect is Intel HD 4000

Set all benchmark related executables to Power Saving. In theory, this means "Use the HD 4000 instead of discrete graphics"

Lower score than before, but still displays Intel HD 4000

After all that, it seems that behind the scenes my laptop and programs are selecting the appropriate graphics card. I'm still a little confused as to why that's happening, but at least I feel better seeing the benchmark results. I'll chalk it up to space magic and not waste any more time with figuring out why.

FFXIV Benchmark 2.0

I tried running the character creator and benchmark in Eyefinity mode, at a res of 4800x900. Unfortunately, the benchmark wasn't really made for my non-standard aspect ratio :(

At least the character creator makes use of the higher res...

Unlike the benchmark

Not really sure what hair color I wanna go for on my Lalafell, though i might stick with my phase 3 color. I'm also considering a hairstyle change.

 Phase 3 style and color...
 

Now blonde with highlights.

New Do...

Highlights make my head look like a tarantula. This is one of the safer color combos. This hairstyle can get pretty wild with highlights!

Didn't really bother with benchmark with Eyefinity res after I saw what it looks like. These are my 1080p results though. Not the best system specs, but the scores weren't terrible. Eyefinity was still enabled though, so the benchmark was rendering the same image on all three monitors. I reran on high with Eyefinity off, and got in the 7200s, so not that big of a difference.

Standard

High

Interesting that High and Max weren't as different as I thought they'd be