Quote Originally Posted by saevel View Post
The engine is DX8 being emulated through DX9 and doing a ton of rendering work in software due to it's legacy engine.
Heck if they updated the DX Wrapper that FFXI runs on to DX 10-11 you could actually support stuff like shiny water, and modern graphics cards. It's all cost vs. reward though. With the dwindling player base, they probably don't see it as cost effective.