Anti Aliasing causes FFXI tu run unacceptable slow and causes graphics glitches.

[Atomic_Skull]

Details: When Anti aliasing is enabled in drivers FFXI slows to a crawl and strange lines appear on characters.

Steps: Turn on "smoothvision" (aka FSAA) in Catalyst Control Center (doesn't matter what settings, I usually use x8 though any level of AA causes this) Set Background and Overlay to the same resolution in FFXI config (e.g. 1360x768 / 1360x768) In FFXI set shadows to either "normal" or "high" (issue doesn't occur with shadows turned off)

(note: for FSAA to work with FFXI, overlay and background must match)

With shadows turned off, FSAA works great and FFXI runs well, when you set shadows to "normal" strange lines appear on your character and the game slows down in crowded areas. If shadows are set to "high" then strange lines appear on all characters and the game slows down to a slideshow.

Date & Time: Today I guess, I don't think this is important.

Frequency: Always

Platform: Windows 7

PC Manufacturer & Model Number: Homebuilt computer (core i7 860)

Operating System: Windows 7

Graphics Card: ATI HD5850 (drivers are Catalyst 11.8)

ISP: AT@T Broadband

Type of Internet Connection: DSL

[Kaisha]

I really cannot remember the last time SE did a performance/compatibility update to FFXI.

Best option for you is to try older drivers and hope it's not an issue by then. SquareEnix hasn't posted a compatible-drivers list on the main FFXI home page in quite some time.

It's a bit annoying as FFXI is running DirectX8.1 which is ancient by today's standards, as well as using an uncommon technique on the PC by having the engine render all the 3D visuals to one texture and fitting that to the screen (the 'background' resolution defines the size of this texture). There's bound to be compatibility issues on a driver level due to the age of the game.

I never recalled anti-aliasing to work on FFXI period because of that background texture also, most players instead just doubled the size of the background resolution and let the subpixel aliasing do the work for them.

[Atomic_Skull]

I really cannot remember the last time SE did a performance/compatibility update to FFXI.

Best option for you is to try older drivers and hope it's not an issue by then. SquareEnix hasn't posted a compatible-drivers list on the main FFXI home page in quite some time.

It's a bit annoying as FFXI is running DirectX8.1 which is ancient by today's standards, as well as using an uncommon technique on the PC by having the engine render all the 3D visuals to one texture and fitting that to the screen (the 'background' resolution defines the size of this texture). There's bound to be compatibility issues on a driver level due to the age of the game.

I never recalled anti-aliasing to work on FFXI period because of that background texture also, most players instead just doubled the size of the background resolution and let the subpixel aliasing do the work for them.

When ATI added FSAA support for Starcraft II it also started working with FFXI. However the Overlay and Background resolutions must match, If they are set to different resolutions then it doesn't do anything.

The glitches and slowdown seem to be related to projection shadows. When you set shadows to "normal" the "lines" appear only on your character, when set to high they appear on all characters, and slowdown increases. If they just had a "low" shadow mode that uses "blob" shadows on everything (like the "normal" option does for other characters) then FSAA would be usable as that type of shadow doesn't seem to cause glitches or affect performance with FSAA.

Of course the ideal solution would be for SE to just fix the shadows in this game to be more efficient. Projection shadows have always caused some amount of slowdown in the "high" option even with a top of the line graphics card.

EDIT: Before anyone asks I'm not using morphological AA. I never use that because it's terrible.

[Atomic_Skull]

I took a few screenshots to show what I'm talking about.

Here's the usual trick of setting the background higher than the overlay.

http://img24.imageshack.us/img24/2149/supersample.png


Here's FFXI with the background and overlay set to 1360x768 with FSAA set to 8x, "Edge Detect" and Anti-Aliasing mode set to "High Quality"


http://img35.imageshack.us/img35/8510/8xfsaa.png


Here's what your character looks like with shadows turned off. The game runs great like this, but no shadows.

http://img844.imageshack.us/img844/9817/shadowsoff.png

This image is with shadows set to "Normal" note the see-though lines along the edges of the UV texture boundaries. These lines are semi-transparent and show the background though the character. There are actually more lines than what you can see in this image but they are difficult to see unless you move around or move the camera around. The game also slows down a bit.

http://img577.imageshack.us/img577/6589/shadowsnormal.png

This is an NPC with shadows set to "Normal" Notice that the "blob" type shadows don't seem to cause the lines.

http://img834.imageshack.us/img834/1420/npcshadowsnormal.png

This is what NPCs look like with shadows set to "High". the lines appear on NPCs now and the game slows down to a slide show.

http://img855.imageshack.us/img855/443/npcshadowshigh.png

[Atomic_Skull]

Bumping this because I never got an official answer.

[Dieth]

You're probably not going to get an official answer because of the following:

FSAA is enabled via a 3rd party (Your ATI Driver) and is not an option in the games settings
FSAA slows graphics cards down to a grind on DX9 and lower (FF is a DX8 game)
You list an incompatible configuration Background draw of 1360x768 that can only set by manually editing your registry.

The background draws officially supported are 2^8, 2^9, 2^10, 2^11

[Atomic_Skull]

FSAA slows graphics cards down to a grind on DX9 and lower (FF is a DX8 game)

No it does not. It does slow it down somewhat, but not this much. It slows down DirextX 10 and 11 games too, that's just the nature of FSAA because it's more work to render the same scene. Nevertheless it shouldn't slow it to a crawl like this.


FSAA is enabled via a 3rd party (Your ATI Driver) and is not an option in the games settings

FFXI is rendering 3D graphics though a third party too (the same ATI drivers). And it's also running on a third party application i.e. Windows. Oh-oh. Calling a graphics card's drivers a "third party application" is just silly.


You list an incompatible configuration Background draw of 1360x768 that can only set by manually editing your registry.

The background draws officially supported are 2^8, 2^9, 2^10, 2^11

You need to recheck FFXI's Config tool. They added support for all available desktop resolutions for Background in the July update. So that resolution (and any other supported by your graphics card) is officially supported in FFXI's config utility for both overlay *and* background settings. Just scroll down past 2048x2048 and you'll see every desktop resolution listed.

[Laraul]

Well I was able to duplicate the massive drop in performance when shadows set to high. It's not FFXI's fault it's clearly the stupid Catalyst application. I found some other interesting issues with trying to invoke FSAA via the "Catalyst Control Center." The screenshots below we're taking with the "Wide Tent" FSAA filter.

Screenshot - Shadows OFF (http://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-4jeImiB1eps/To1Pp01j-_I/AAAAAAAAFzw/Be3JpOb9Wr8/s1600/FSAA-shadows-off.jpg)
Screenshot - Shadows NORMAL (http://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-hJ0dSiYJ4tM/To1PqZd-tBI/AAAAAAAAFz0/xRHfLQ9ZC0k/s1600/FSAA-shadows-normal.jpg)
Screenshot - Shadows HIGH (http://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-B-HexTkRkGc/To1Pqygox7I/AAAAAAAAFz4/6tAo3kxl1Rg/s1600/FSAA-shadows-high.jpg)

ALWAYS leave the "Catalyst Control Center" settings set to default. Better yet remove the stupid thing since it's completely unnecessary. Can't believe AMD/NVidia include this type of software with their "drivers". They usually don't do ANYTHING. They're just included to let you *think* you can improve the way things look. They often do nothing at all for most things. In order for them it to work they have to modify the kernel mode drivers to include detection of the game and what to hook onto in order to produce an effect. Ugh.

Anyhow everything works as it should in FFXI as long as "Use Application Settings" are checked.

[Atomic_Skull]

Anyhow everything works as it should in FFXI as long as "Use Application Settings" are checked.

Except that you don't get any FSAA and have moiré artifacts because left on it's own FFXI will not use FSAA and will use bilinear filtering instead of anisotropic filtering.

That might be how FFXI "should" look (being a 9 year old DirectX 8 game) but if it is I sure as hell don't want it to look like that.


The screenshots below we're taking with the "Wide Tent" FSAA filter.

I avoid Wide Tent because it blurs edges too much in my opinion.


ALWAYS leave the "Catalyst Control Center" settings set to default. Better yet remove the stupid thing since it's completely unnecessary. Can't believe AMD/NVidia include this type of software with their "drivers". They usually don't do ANYTHING. They're just included to let you *think* you can improve the way things look. They often do nothing at all for most things. In order for them it to work they have to modify the kernel mode drivers to include detection of the game and what to hook onto in order to produce an effect. Ugh.

No offense, but it looks like you don't know what those settings actually do and what applications they will and won't affect (DirectX 10 and 11 apps aren't affected by driver level AA settings for example, also some DirectX 9 games have AA and other settings deliberately disabled by Nvidia and ATI's drivers because it causes problems with the game's internal graphics settings configuration)

[saevel]

FFXI is an old game with a horrible graphics engine. I've since given up trying to make it look better then the poorman's FSAA trick. Until SE updates the engine from DX8.1 to DX9 or higher then we'll continue having poor graphics performance on high end cards. I'm surprised your able to get stable FSAA working at all in FFXI.

[Mirage]

Well I was able to duplicate the massive drop in performance when shadows set to high. It's not FFXI's fault it's clearly the stupid Catalyst application. I found some other interesting issues with trying to invoke FSAA via the "Catalyst Control Center." The screenshots below we're taking with the "Wide Tent" FSAA filter.

Screenshot 1 - Shadows OFF (http://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-4jeImiB1eps/To1Pp01j-_I/AAAAAAAAFzw/Be3JpOb9Wr8/s1600/FSAA-shadows-off.jpg)
Screenshot 1 - Shadows NORMAL (http://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-hJ0dSiYJ4tM/To1PqZd-tBI/AAAAAAAAFz0/xRHfLQ9ZC0k/s1600/FSAA-shadows-normal.jpg)
Screenshot 1 - Shadows HIGH (http://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-B-HexTkRkGc/To1Pqygox7I/AAAAAAAAFz4/6tAo3kxl1Rg/s1600/FSAA-shadows-high.jpg)

ALWAYS leave the "Catalyst Control Center" settings set to default. Better yet remove the stupid thing since it's completely unnecessary. Can't believe AMD/NVidia include this type of software with their "drivers". They usually don't do ANYTHING. They're just included to let you *think* you can improve the way things look. They often do nothing at all for most things. In order for them it to work they have to modify the kernel mode drivers to include detection of the game and what to hook onto in order to produce an effect. Ugh.

Anyhow everything works as it should in FFXI as long as "Use Application Settings" are checked.

That's way too much jpeg compression to give a good example of how your game looks. Well, except that it looks super blurry.

[Laraul]

Except that you don't get any FSAA and have moiré artifacts because left on it's own FFXI will not use FSAA and will use bilinear filtering instead of anisotropic filtering.

That might be how FFXI "should" look (being a 9 year old DirectX 8 game) but if it is I sure as hell don't want it to look like that.

You know how the best looking FSAA works? The original approached developed by 3DFX? By rendering the game at a higher resolution then it's displayed. It's called Super Sampling AA.


That's way too much jpeg compression to give a good example of how your game looks. Well, except that it looks super blurry.

You can clearly read the text in all the images. And you can clearly see that the game becomes very blurry depending on what setting the "Shadows" option is set at. The purpose of the images to begin with.