Upgraded texture pack?

[Atomic_Skull]

I'd be concerned about heavy use of high resolution textures slowing the game down too much, since it doesn't use your video card at all and does everything on the CPU

It doesn't do everything on the CPU, it just only uses DirectX 8 functions. If it was software rendering then it wouldn't need T&L, wouldn't use DTX1 texture compression, and it wouldn't use Shader Model 1.0 (disable any of those things and FFXI will not run) In fact it would not need a 3D card at all and could run on an old S3 VGA card.

All nonsense. they're basically the same, how can they have less "character" than before? the only substantial difference is the Roegadyn do not have tails. If anything they have more character simply because the models are much more well done, all body features look more polished in general.

No they are not the same, they do NOT have as much character as the originals. Mithras are CAT people, with black cat noses and feline markings and facial features that are reminiscent of a cat. Miqo'te are merely human women with cat ears and tails. Mithras are depicted as fierce huntresses in both the game backstory and in their animations. Miqo'te's appearance and animations are annoying moeblob bullshit.

I've said it many times but the races in FFXI have vastly more character than FFXIV, all FFXIV races are human races with bits stuck on. FFXI races try to stay in character and are actually different from each other, I've played both games and although FFXIV is pretty I still prefer the how FFXI looks.

This.

[oliveira]

It doesn't do everything on the CPU, it just only uses DirectX 8 functions. If it was software rendering then it wouldn't need T&L, wouldn't use DTX1 texture compression, and it wouldn't use Shader Model 1.0 (disable any of those things and FFXI will not run) In fact it would not need a 3D card at all and could run on an old S3 VGA card.

It may not do everything, but it does a lot of stuff using the CPU. In fact it mimics what a PS2 does, which is render and apply textures to the graphics using the "CPU". The PS2 does not use it's main CPU for that as it's not fast enough but it has two very powerful programable Toshiba DSPs (Vector Units) inside of the CPU die just for that. Also, there's a graphics chip there called "Graphics Synthesizer" which does lighting and particle effects after the bulk of the rendering is done and sent. Data rate on that system is like 35GB/s so it does not suffer slowdown/framerate drop with too complex geometries (like dust, rain, snow, confluxes, telepoints).

So the game stutters when you stand by a conflux because DX8 is a old unwanted API, Nvidia and AMD do not care about it at all. The game uses it to perform the lighting and particle effects that on the PS2 would be done in the GS chip.

Newer graphics cards are not capable of processing DX8 data natively, which means the driver will push the conversion task onto the CPU (which is already busy doing the rendering of the ~125 player characters standing around Joachim at Port Jeuno or those transparent shades of the veridical confluxes) because the graphics card need the data to be translated for it's native format prior to processing...
You end needing a (|Incredibly Tough|) PC to play decently.


I'm not posting this just to disagree or anything of that sort. I can only agree that the PC version of the game need to abandon that "PS2 compatibility" model so it can finally run in the PC in a more efficient way.

I have a GTX280 on my PC... (it's G200 based, so not as bad as G400/Fermi based cards for FFXI)
I can hear it whistle when I stand by a veridical conflux...


They would maybe get working on that if they see this thread. One can hope lol