I am playing Final Fantasy 14 on a Toshiba Qosmio X70 (17.3 in laptop, 2 TB HD, 20 GB 1600 MHz RAM, intel 4-core i7 4700MQ processor, GeForce 770M with 3 GB dedicated) and I notice that my game tends to go back and forth between great fps (frames per second) and then gets throttled back. I can hear my fan spinning up each time the game gets choppy.
It does this regardless of the quality I have it set to. When it is not doing the back and forth choppiness thing, I can play it Maximum settings at around 40 fps. When I play it on minimum I can get more like 60 fps, but in either case, it sometimes get choppy (it gets choppy for about 1-2 seconds then goes back to playing well and it might do this every 10-15 seconds).
Any idea what is causing this intermittent low in fps? It is not anything in-game since I am sitting in a town crafting and not doing anything intensive. Is this a heating issue? Is it RAM related? What do you guys think and how can I troubleshoot this to figure out what is causing this?
Best Answer
After further investigation, I found that the same type of up/down performance was happening when I as running some code I had written. I found out that my computer was throttling back resources due to heat. I have, since, got a laptop cooling fan and can now play FF14 on max settings without overheating (and thus losing performance)