Can a slow hard-drive effect game perfomance?

Hello. Final Fantasy a Realm Reborn runs 50-40fps most of the time but when entering area's or turning toward more detailed area's it seems to chop the framerate in half near enough. If I moved this to a faster hard-drive would this actually effect performance in any other way other than loading? Thank you.

Only if you don't have enough memory and it's swapping to hd. Also known as thrashing. You should post up your complete specs to get a better handle on what's going on.

I'm planning on replacing this, I checked the order date and it was 2011, so it's a few years old now

"Asus GTX 560Ti DirectCU II 1GB GDDR5 Dual DVI Mini HDMI PCI-E Graphics Card"

Any suggestions? Within the £100-£150 price range. Thanks.

It is not your hard drive....it would be a million other things before I would think hard drive. Yes on high settings that card is probably not going to cut it in FFXIV, even in 2011 that was a value gpu.

It was £170. A value card is around £70 - £90. It has served me very well and up until this point, hasn't had any major problems. This can primarily be attributed to the slew of console ports.

Anyway, can anyone suggest a decent replacement for around £100 - 150 please, thank you.

I don't think FF is that heavy is it?Isn't it a CPU bound engine anyway? Whats the ram and CPU? It sounds like a bottleneck more than the actual GPU itself unless the game is gpu bound and it has some serious video options that you have cranked up. Does it use physx, tessellation, SSAA? What resolution are you running it at? A 560 should do fine normally without such features but I don't know much about the new FF. It could just be buggy performance issues that get fixed later in a patch.

To be clear, the game almost maxed out is perfectly playable. In linear area's I can near enough hit 60fps. The drops to 30fps (and sometimes 25) are jarring. And seems to happen in busy area's or specifically entering area's. Weirdly, changing things like bringing the resolution down from 1080p all the way down to 720p doesn't seem to do much. Likewise flipping SSAO off/on only seems to have very much effect. HDR and draw distance seem to be the culprit. Using low LOD for distant objects seem to give 7-12 fps frame boost.

It uses FXAA, so regardless of all the cool effects on shadow like super high res shadows it's abit of a jag fest. I tried using Nvidia inspector to force grid based supersampling, I think you can probably guess how that turned out.

It is very demanding, especially for an MMO. Most MMO's do not have this much detail.

And the game is not new and is optimized just fine. I run it maxed out on a 770 and a Phenom X4 965 flawlessly. Obviously my cpu is the weak spot and I get zero sign of bottlenecking at all. I am no expert on this engine but I will toss out an anecdote and say it is more of a gpu intensive game than cpu. And he never did give us any other specs so tough to help there.

Ah **** it, it's not that big of a deal. Thanks for help.

Like others have said it's probably not the HDD and something more to do with the game optimization. Saying that though, a slow HDD WILL affect gaming performance, especially in an MMO where it constantly loads lots of data. Try running heavy MMOs off an SSD if possible.

MMOs do perform better on a SSD, as Felipe pointed out. But I sincerely doubt those drops in FPS are because of the HDD. This would be a fairly decent video card upgrade for you.

The game is optimized fine, I am currently playing it.

You could just run Task Manager or Perfmon to actually measure the performance of the various hardware components to see if there's a bottleneck (rather than asking us to guess).

-Byshop

@uninspiredcup: HDD only effects loading. these days there are only two types. HDD amd SSD. SSD will load games pretty much instantly while HDD is the way its always been

it won't help your framerate, it helps load times in games having a fast ssd or something. Also makes less stuttering if a game doesn't fully load its textures into your videocards ram. Physical ram helps also. if your low it causes lots of stuttering.

I have 16gbs ram, but sometimes if i load enough programs and it fills my ram... games start to really run terrible.

basically fast hard drive is always good, ssd all the way.

Hard drives will not affect your in game performance in anyway.

It absolutely can, but not in the same way the a slow video card or CPU might. Games that use large open areas (like MMOs) may constantly stream data from the hard drive while moving through the open world, but a slow hard drive will typically result in dips in the frame rate if it can't keep up or texture pop-in depending on how the engine is built. The tricky thing is that it's always about the combination of the components, because more RAM/Video RAM can balance this out.

-Byshop

I decided to pick this up and managed to get £170 + Watchdog coupon. So thank you.

It only affects your loading times.

Can effect loading time and cause lag if you are short on main memory (Due to slow swapping) .

If you are buying an SSD to improve in game performance you are about to be disappointed. I don't care what anyone says, the price does not justify it as a gaming rig upgrade....esp not when you are still running 2011 hardware.

being an MMO, i wanna blame the internet speed or ping before i blame the parts. We are running it happily on a an i7 920, 12gb ram, and GTX 460 (previously a GTX 275). Most settings cranked to high but similar issues as u describe, but we live in australia so thats what i blame ;)

Got new card, abit better but still seems to drop to 20fps at times. Very weird.
Can down sample which is cool, 2560X1440, the game uses shitty FXAA so it helps abit. Albeit, I can't read any fucking text now.

TXAA anygud? Downloading blackflag now. Also does adoptive V-sync effect performance much? Thank you my friends, you have been most helpful.