According to Square Enix, for Final Fantasy 14, you need at least an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz processor with a NVIDIA® GeForce® 9600 series with 512 MB VRAM or equivalent video card. Full breakdown is available on the Square Enix Lodestone site.For the sake of brevity, all other components aren’t important (nor are they important practically compared to the CPU and video card). My normal workstation is an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.8 GHZ and has the exact GeForce 9600 with 512 of VRAM video card. So if I were to take the min specs literally, my normal workstation computer should at least be able to play the game. Well, I ran the benchmark provided by Square and something isn’t right.

According to the benchmark page, a 1500 score is the minimum you need to play Final Fantasy 14. My computer hardware and software more then met the minimum system requirements yet it scored a lowly 375 on low resolution mode!!! That’s a huge discrepancy. And 1500 isn’t even the target you should aim for. 2500 is. Here’s the description of what 1500 means: “Capable of running the game, but will experience considerable slowdown. Adjusting settings is unlikely to improve performance.” At 2000: “Capable of running the game, but may experience some slowdown. Adjust settings to improve performance.”

I don’t know if they’re just being super, super conservative or is plain not aware of this disconnect. Min specs should get you min playing ability.

How does the game play on my work computer? Well I’m able to run the game on my work computer but the lag is so terrible that it takes 5-7 secs for each command to register. Though if I drop all the graphic settings to lowest and use the lowest video buffer setting, I can play it just fine. Except every pixel is 25x bigger making it look like I’m playing through one of those anonymity mask they put over confidential sources during news interviews.

Fortunately, I have another computer that I use for video editing and 3-D modeling. The cpu on that computer is an Intel i5 processor 2.66 GHz. The video card is a GeForce 460 with 1GB of VRAM. Running the benchmark on low resolution, I got a much healthier 4500+ on multiple testings.

I then got curious as to which is most important, the CPU or the graphics card? Well I subbed out the video card on my video editing computer with a GeForce 9400, 512 VRAM. (I wished I could’ve used my GeForce 9300 card, but it was too old for my i5 motherboard.) My benchmark score dropped to a less than adequate 1400+ on multiple testings. Unfortunately I couldn’t run a test with a lower CPU and a high end graphic card as I don’t have a Core 2 Duo motherboard that uses PCI Express 2.0 graphic cards.

What I can conclude from all of this, with a reasonable amount of certainty, is that the biggest single component that you can change that would give you the most bang for the buck would be to upgrade your graphics card. Buying a new CPU generally entails buying a new motherboard, new memory, and perhaps a new power supply. Whereas, you don’t need all of that for a new graphics card. Those with disposable income though should go all in for a new computer.

I plan to follow up this post with some research as to which graphic card would give you the most bang for the buck.

Hoc is a player of Final Fantasy 14. He is on the Fabul server using the name “Saito Uchiha.” You will find him primarily playing Pugilist but most of his time is spent crafting or gathering.