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

[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
Screenshot 1 - Shadows NORMAL
Screenshot 1 - Shadows HIGH

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.