For those of you who are still on the fence and deciding whether or not to get windows Vista for it's sleek and handy-dandy utilities, dx10, and other good tools that vista has over XP, I strongly urge you to get it, as long as you don't play FFXI. For those of you who don't know FFXI is a MMORPG that is fairly popular, though dwindling in the past years in NA, it's still a great game imho, but to each their own as some like WOW and LOTRO now. My point of this post is that if you own a newer NVIDIA card, namely one of the top of the line types, an 8 series card, FFXI runs at around 6-8fps when more than a few models are on screen (ie almost everywhere you go). It cannot handle shadows, it cannot handle hardly anything a five year old game has to throw at it. Yet the card and OS can very easily handle a new game like Bioshock or Lost Planet at full settings, but cannot handle a 5yr old game that a PS2 can easily handle. This has been a problem since February and has not been addressed or added to their list of problems to be fixed in the myriad of driver updates. It's quite sad that a 5yr old game can bring a really great gaming rig to it's knees. It may be because the game is still running DX8 (to be changed this December to dx9). But having the game being switched from a really crappy port to a more PC friendly port should of been done right from the start instead of shoddily porting it with some of the most horrific coding imaginable.

I'd like to adamantly warn anybody who thinks of playing FFXI on vista with any recent NVIDIA card, even newish ones like the 7950s have horrible lag when it comes to bard songs, firaga spells and the like. I sincerely hope that anybody who has a fix or anything of the sort for this would post here, and if not maybe open the thread up to other games/programs that don't function well (game related please) with vista and/or NVIDIA cards. I've tried many new drivers, and tons of driver cleaning registry fixes the whole deal and nothing has worked so far. I actually bought vista to work with all my new games, and now find myself having bought an XP OS cd and going through all the hoopla that you need to do in order to allow a RAID mobo to work with an IDE drive despite it not being hooked up to a set of RAID drives for anything it would access. But my point was that XP runs much better, so if you're on the fence so far for os and you're a big FFXI player, I highly suggest you either keep your rig till christmas when not only sales go on for things you may want to buy, but WOTG comes out and they switch to DX9 which *may* fix the problems, but for now I'll have to keep my XP strictly for ffxi ; ;. I hope if anything I've steered one person away from making the same mistake as me.

I would like to clarify, any ATI card even the newer ones as far as I know, work perfectly fine with FFXI and Vista and have nearly no problems at all. Seems to me NVIDIA is the best at making hardware, but horrible with driver/software, and ATI is just the opposite, damned either way really, though I would prefer good hardware as people can mod drivers to be much more efficient / better. However I'd like to see any suggestions or perhaps other games that would have a similar problem and how they can be fixed.

 

 

 

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ATI cards work perfect in my case and I never updated it's software but then again I haven't been able to play Ragnarok Online 2 with it. Also FFXI currently isn't the best game you probably would want to pick up as the population seems to decline every day, I was quite sad when I was left alone in Vulkurum dunes without a party for days.

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