Recommended Gaming laptop

[Wil31080]

Looking to get a new laptop that won't have issues playing the game. I'm currently playing on a older HP I3 and the game is playable but looks kind of bad. I bought and just returned an Omen laptop a few days ago because I was not able to get the no icons text to show on Playonline. I did not try installing other programs since it looked a bit complicated. Only setting that I check was something about direct x being checked. The laptop I returned was

HP OMEN - Transcend 14" 120Hz 3K OLED Gaming Laptop - Intel Core Ultra 7-255H - 32GB Memory - NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 - 1TB SSD - Shadow Black

I was planning on also gaming other newer games in that laptop but changed my mind. I just want a laptop that will play FF11 but also don't want an old one and willing to spend around 1k or so. I'm a returning player but gave up trying to get my old account back after trying over 2 hours to get my old account back up.

[Gwydion]

That'll do just fine on FF11 and modern games since it is the latest 5000 series of Nvidia GPU.

[Wil31080]

The laptop you see on my original post is the one I couldn't figure out how to fix the no icon no text issue with Playonline

[Alhanelem]

Pretty much any PC in the last 10-15 years can run FFXI without any issue whatsoever.

[Dragoy]

Looking to get a new laptop that won't have issues playing the game. I'm currently playing on a older HP I3 and the game is playable but looks kind of bad.

Looks kind of bad how exactly, I wonder?

If you're able to crank up the settings (the background resolution in particular), and the game still runs, there shouldn't really be a difference compared to the beefiest machine of all time. At this time.

That is, as long as proper graphics hardware drivers are in use, and it's not going through some software pipe...


I'm a returning player but gave up trying to get my old account back after trying over 2 hours to get my old account back up.

Curious about what was the issue with this, though of course can't really help with it, but did you contact the customer support regarding it?


The laptop you see on my original post is the one I couldn't figure out how to fix the no icon no text issue with Playonline

I've seen this particular issue, or at least an eerily similar one reported at least a couple of times, and there may be workarounds for it.

Of course you can't test any of it any longer at this point in time, but should it happen again with yet another machine, maybe the information will be of some help.

Quote from thread "Playonline text and icons not showing up":


Greetings and welcome!

I have never personally seen this, but from the looks of it, the machine seems to suffer from the same, or very similar issue(s) related to Intel/NVIDIA hardware/software reported here:

Playonline viewer shows no text nor icons.. Please help.

Also here:

新しいノートPCにFF11をインストールし、PlayOnline_Viewerを起動したらUIが崩れて入力できない

There one user found that the following helped them:


It was either OpenGL GDI compatibility on NVIDIA control panel needs to be set to compatible mode or adjust desktop size and position needs to be set to no scaling.

On the Japanese side, simply updating the Intel Arc related drivers has helped one user, and for the other, it looks like they used an external display via a HDMI connection, which may have been going via the NVIDIA hardware instead, and which they couldn't figure out how to make use of for the integrated display.

I hope some of this will help you as well.

Good luck!

It is not uncommon to see older software run worse and worse on newer hardware and, in particular, newer Windows versions (luckily I have no personal experience with Windows since 2010 though; all Linux machines here :V).

FFXI still does get compatibility updates from time to time, so maybe there will be a fix on "our side" for these icons and text going missing too. Eventually.

[Wil31080]

I just got an AMD Ryzen 7000 series and the game worked without me doing anything. So damn glad. I'm scared to attempt to mess with the graphics. It looks better than my old laptop that I was using.

[radar]

It's fairly shocking that Square still have not updated direct X, there are numerous graphics issues with this such as flickering model seams on certain armors and birds wings etc. You can fix it with 3rd party software but most don't.

[Alhanelem]

It's fairly shocking that Square still have not updated direct X, there are numerous graphics issues with this such as flickering model seams on certain armors and birds wings etc. You can fix it with 3rd party software but most don't.
Particularly in the era of FFXI, there were many heavily customized versions of directX 8 and 9. You can't just click a button and move them to a newer version, the APIs have changed substantially between major revisions and aren't directly compatible. When you run old games, an old version of directX is used. Using a newer directX version is even pointless unless a game is going to use the features introduced in said newer version.