Can we please have 60FPS and increased draw distance in the PC version?

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Originally Posted by Raydeus

Yeah, it's DX8 (used to be 7 I think)

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No it's always been DirectX 8.

[quote[ A DX9 client upgrade would do so much for the game I can only hope they will actually do it once they drop the PS2 support for good (if the game survives that long that is.)[/quote]


DirectX 8 on modern versions of windows runs by wrapping DirectX 8 calls into the equivalent DirectX 9 ones. On Windows Vista and onward D3D8.dll is a wrapper that calls D3D9.dll.

Updating to DirectX 9 wouldn't require dropping PS2 support. There's really not that much difference between DirectX 8 and Directx 9. 9 is just an enhanced version of the fixed rendering pipeline used in DirextX 8 unlike DirectX 10 and onward which use a programmable pipeline (DirectX 10 was a fundamental change in how both 3D APIs and the underlying hardware function)

Most directX 8 calls have direct equivalents in directX 9 and updating an application to be a "native" directx 9 application is mostly just a matter of substitution. You just have it use D3D9.dll instead of D3D8.dll and change the function call to the D3D9 equivalent (usually, some obsolete stuff was removed from D3D9).

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Originally Posted by Raydeus

Yes it does.

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Apologies.

Perhaps I wasn't too clear there. My comment was mostly about the 60 FPS youtube videos in general, not a comment on if a player has or has not modified the FFXI client or its parts in the memory.

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Originally Posted by Dragoy

Apologies.

Perhaps I wasn't too clear there. My comment was mostly about the 60 FPS youtube videos in general, not a comment on if a player has or has not modified the FFXI client or its parts in the memory.

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If the video is running at 60 FPS (which you can see in the player info in the context menu on youtube) and the game looks like it's 60 FPS, then the game is running at 60 FPS.

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Originally Posted by Crevox

If the video is running at 60 FPS (which you can see in the player info in the context menu on youtube) and the game looks like it's 60 FPS, then the game is running at 60 FPS.

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Perhaps I still wasn't being clear enough. Sorry about that! ^^;

My point is that the video can be running at 60 FPS while the game is not. I'm not saying it isn't in that particular video; it may well be, though I don't see what it proves other than it is possible to do it via unsupported means.

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Originally Posted by Atomic_Skull

Most directX 8 calls have direct equivalents in directX 9 and updating an application to be a "native" directx 9 application is mostly just a matter of substitution. You just have it use D3D9.dll instead of D3D8.dll and change the function call to the D3D9 equivalent (usually, some obsolete stuff was removed from D3D9).

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Last time I checked (a few years ago), they were using DrawPrimitiveUP which as far as I could tell was added for d3d7 compatability to d3d8, but it's still supported in d3d9. When I did some tests after SE announced the end of XP support I found that with 50 characters onscreen, windows7 is about 30% slower than XP (both 32 and 64 bit 7). It seems that it should be possible to maintain 60fps at all times using a 5GHz Haswell and windows XP on a GTX780 (with shadows turned off). Newer cards no longer have XP drivers, and AMD cards are slower than Nvidia cards with XI.

Why do shadows cause such severe slowdown?

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Originally Posted by Diraco

Why do shadows cause such severe slowdown?

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Only on modern graphics cards. If you use a older card/driver you can still keep shadows on and have decent perfomance. I believe that has to do with newer cards moving on to full DX10/11 specs and delegating earlier stuff to software implementations.

Then on that scenario of modern video card + heavily CPU bound old game you have the game competing with the display driver and the "older directX back compatibility wrapper" for CPU time. Not really pretty, eh ?

Yeah, it's really perplexing how such an old game can slow down so much even on today's high end CPUs/GPUs. There has to be some major efficiency issue in the game's rendering subsystem or something. It may well be what Oliveira said, though it feels like it has to be more than just that.

It's worth noting that I can run other 3D intensive applications at the same time and FFXI performs exactly the same regardless.

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Originally Posted by oliveira

Only on modern graphics cards. If you use a older card/driver you can still keep shadows on and have decent perfomance. I believe that has to do with newer cards moving on to full DX10/11 specs and delegating earlier stuff to software implementations.

Then on that scenario of modern video card + heavily CPU bound old game you have the game competing with the display driver and the "older directX back compatibility wrapper" for CPU time. Not really pretty, eh ?

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I actually tried with older cards along with the appropriate old drivers, and I found that all nvidia cards/drivers before driver version 175 are very slow (tested as old as a 7800gtx) -- nvidia added a fix specifically for XI at that point. It's too bad the fix also broke anisotropic filtering. Cards slower than GTX280 don't have enough fillrate for 2048x2048 background resolution to hold 60fps with a lot of transparent textures. Any ATI card that has enough fillrate (hd2900xt or faster) has drivers that use too much CPU. The sweet spot with AMD drivers was version 7.10 if I rememeber right.

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Originally Posted by Crevox

Game is poorly optimized. Even if they unlock the frame rate to 60 FPS, it will struggle to even maintain that in the majority of scenarios, regardless of how good your computer is.

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The game is not poorly optimized god you people always ask the same damn question. The damn game was build for the PlayStation 2 period it was not build for PC! They cant increase the FPS cause of the PlayStation cant handle it. It is a MMORPG build off a game console and not a PC.

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Originally Posted by Diraco

I actually tried with older cards along with the appropriate old drivers, and I found that all nvidia cards/drivers before driver version 175 are very slow (tested as old as a 7800gtx) -- nvidia added a fix specifically for XI at that point. It's too bad the fix also broke anisotropic filtering. Cards slower than GTX280 don't have enough fillrate for 2048x2048 background resolution to hold 60fps with a lot of transparent textures. Any ATI card that has enough fillrate (hd2900xt or faster) has drivers that use too much CPU. The sweet spot with AMD drivers was version 7.10 if I rememeber right.

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9600 GT runs this game with out lag in the macro system.