Rereleasing FFXI

[Mirage]

I think something that would be much more beneficial right now is allowing the PC version to use the full power of current computers and graphic cards.

The system doesn't even let you use Multi-Core processing, so you end up using only the speed of a single core. I'm sure there are alot of options that aren't supported by newer graphic cards, I don't have the feeling my game is running more smoothly even after getting a new card.

Almost all of the rendering takes place on your CPU, on a single core of it. The only stat on a video card that "really" affects the game is the memory bandwidth, and that stopped to be a bottleneck somewhere around Geforce 7900 (or equivalent). Multicore support wouldn't be very helpful to this game, I think. Except the graphics, there isn't a lot of things that needs to be processed by the CPU in this game. Just getting the graphics over on the GPU would solve practically all performance issues.

However, making the game utilize a GPU properly is probably quite a bit of work, and that's why we probably won't see it happening.

[Celedh]

I was tossing that in because it seems there are still instances that I'm not getting 30 frames a second.

Dualcore 2.8ghz, 4gb RAM, Geforce GTX250. It's not the top of the line, but it's miles beyond what the game should need. Yet, still having choppy framerate at times for some reason. Unless there are settings I don't know about, I'd say that giving it the whole CPU and GPU speed would help with that. I'm playing without Shadows or Weather Effects as well, makes no sense.

[Mirage]

It's not as easy as "giving it" the entire CPU, though. If you take away the graphics part, a single core of a modern PC would be way more than the game would ever need. The only reason why FF11 is very CPU dependent is that practically all the 3D rendering is happening on the CPU as well, not on the GPU where it really belongs.

If the game did the 3D on the GPU like every other game in the world, the fact that it only uses a single core would be of no significance, because apart from the 3D, the game uses very little CPU power.

[Kiroko]

I guess if you really wanted to and had the means to you could update the game yourself if you had the programs, for all we know there is some person out there who updated most of their game in some way,shape, or form, and is playing in it as we speak.

[Atomic_Skull]

I get the distinct impression that the OP wants all of us players without major-money gaming rigs (computer and console) to GTFO... Would I be correct in this assumption?

The Unreal 3 engine scales quite well on lesser hardware platforms so better graphics doesn't have to exclude midrange and low end systems.

[Atomic_Skull]

If the game did the 3D on the GPU like every other game in the world, the fact that it only uses a single core would be of no significance, because apart from the 3D, the game uses very little CPU power.

I don't know where this "FFXI doesn't render on the GPU" started but FFXI does not use software rendering. It does use D3D8.DLL so it doesn't use a lot of the features of modern video cards but it isn't correct to say that it doesn't use the GPU.

If this were the case it wouldn't require a card with transformation and lighting and it also wouldn't have compatibility problems with Windows Vista and Window's 7's pixel and vertex shader implementation because it wouldn't use them.

[Mirage]

It doesn't require a card with transform and lighting. The box says it does, but it's no problem to make it run without that.

It basically uses the video card as a glorified frame buffer, not much else.

[Shadotter]

Umm, I remember when I started playing this game i had to upgrade my graphics card since it didn't have that, and even workarounds just gave me a mess of white boxes.

[Atomic_Skull]

It doesn't require a card with transform and lighting. The box says it does, but it's no problem to make it run without that.

It basically uses the video card as a glorified frame buffer, not much else.

You have to use a T&L emulator to make it run if your video card doesn't support it. That is not the same thing as "not needing it"

It also needs Pixel Shader 1.0 and Vertex Shader 1.0. After a lot of testing I found out that this was what was causing the rendering errors on certain objects (such as Roc's wings) in Windows 7 and Vista. Windows 7/Vista forces applications to use at least Shader Model 2.0. Restricting the video card to Shader Model 1.0 will fix this problem (but also disable Windows Aero)

If you disable DXT texture compression on your video card all geometry (models landscapes and polygon "billboards") become flat shaded white polygons.

Forced FSAA actually works in FFXI with Catalyst 11.1 and higher if you set the Background to match the Overlay resolution. It's very slow when you enable shadows, but it works.

And finally, FFXI would not need D3D8.dll if it wasn't using the GPU.

[Mirage]

well if it's not that, why does it run so poorly?