Anyone else underwhelmed by the new DX 11 graphics?

Nope. In fact, my brother in law likes to walk into my room while i'm playing just to stare at the beautiful graphics for a bit then leave. heh @_@

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Originally Posted by Illya

Tessellation and Parallax Occlusion depend on the resolution of the texture being "bumpified".

The textures in FFXIV must fit in a PS3's 256 MB of VRAM.

This is the result.

Until the PS3 is finally kicked to the curb and the game can be developed for PCs and PS4 with large memory pools, this what we have to live with. The other improvements in DX11 such as lighting/shading and reflections are very nice though.

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Yes, for parallax occlusion mapping. Tessellation on the other hand has nothing to do with the base textures.

Tessellation actually adds polygons based on a "higher order description" of the surface.

As for textures, there is no reason why the PC and PS4 can't have access to the hi-res ones - apart from them not existing.

With regards to parallax mapping, it seems to be a limitation of the technique. Unreal suffers from it too.

https://udn.epicgames.com/Three/Deve....html#Parallax Occlusion mapping

The only solution seems to be to "flatten"/reduce the effect as the view angle approaches oblique angles - which SE has done for some surfaces but not others like rocks.

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Originally Posted by Illya

The textures in FFXIV must fit in a PS3's 256 MB of VRAM.

Until the PS3 is finally kicked to the curb and the game can be developed for PCs and PS4 with large memory pools, this what we have to live with. The other improvements in DX11 such as lighting/shading and reflections are very nice though.

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We've gone down this road before. The PS3 version uses simple/smaller textures than the PC/PS4 version... it has little impact on other builds of the game.

Beyond image quality concerns we also find extensive use of lower resolution textures and normal maps on the PS3 - along with a reduced amount of anisotropic filtering - which further softens the overall look of the game, leaving certain parts of the stylised artwork looking smudged and rather indistinct in comparison to the much cleaner PC version.

Source: Face-Off: Final Fantasy 14 (PS3 v PC)

I only hope there's HD texture for our character mesh.

At least you pc users got an update :P ps4 users got the shaft for now;)

The game in DX9 looked terrible to me to say the least. Wood looked too sterile, like some wooden blocks from ages ago, rock castles looked more like paper props to me. With DX11 that was a huge change for the better. now i can move around towns without cringing hard.

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Originally Posted by Zenif

The game in DX9 looked terrible to me to say the least. Wood looked too sterile, like some wooden blocks from ages ago, rock castles looked more like paper props to me. With DX11 that was a huge change for the better. now i can move around towns without cringing hard.

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Well I hate to mention it (again) but a MMORPG has to use game models that are like 1/10th the complexity of single-player games. (Compare Archeage with single player games made on the CryEngine(3) engine to it's Engine showcase - Crysis 3, and then look at Star Citizen (another MMO...ish game)), the more stuff there is to render, the less complex they have to be. Archeage had pretty good water, but it also dropped the frame rate a lot. The land and player models however were worse than FFXIV in that regard.

FFXIV "scales down" on the PS4 and PS3 with smaller textures and shorter draw distance. That is something that doesn't even get considered for PC-only games. Nowadays, developers keep trying to cram the same game into a 1GB mobile app, that would otherwise take 25GB on a PC.

I'm cheating a bit with downsampling and Reshade, but I, for one, am quite pleased with how my game looks. (Right click -> "open in new tab/window" or "view image" for full size, unless you're using Internet Explorer, in which case get a new browser)

http://i.imgur.com/VhlNDql.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/B6NyX7P.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/zUu7J2m.jpg

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Originally Posted by Zyrusticae

I'm cheating a bit with downsampling and Reshade, but I, for one, am quite pleased with how my game looks. (Right click -> "open in new tab/window" or "view image" for full size, unless you're using Internet Explorer, in which case get a new browser)

http://i.imgur.com/VhlNDql.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/B6NyX7P.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/zUu7J2m.jpg

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Downsample? I can't even hold 40 fps at my monitor's native 1080p. xD

I see you have added (faked?**) chromatic aberration and altered the color balance.

** Unless I'm wrong, post processing mods like sweetfx don't have access to the depth buffer.

I think they messed up the interaction between tesselation and parallax mapping at some point because a lot of surfaces (primarily rocky surfaces in the Forelands) look very different at different camera angles. Other than that, SSAA with proper scaling of all UI elements would be all I really want. Can't use VSR because the R9 290 can only do 3200x1800 = no perfect scaling. Pretty happy with how the game looks in general, especially the characters.

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Originally Posted by seekified

I think they messed up the interaction between tesselation and parallax mapping at some point because a lot of surfaces (primarily rocky surfaces in the Forelands) look very different at different camera angles.

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That is a limitation of Parallax Occlusion Mapping. It affects engines like Unreal too,

http://i.imgur.com/aOv3jgz.jpg
https://udn.epicgames.com/Three/Deve...edMapping.html

The only way to "fix it" is to flatten the effect as viewing angle approach near parallel with the surface. SE forgot to on some surfaces - like rocks.

SSAA is very wasteful. I only have a R9 270 thus can't even maintain 60 fps. They need to add more AA options - SMAA T2x (or some variation of) would be a good choice.

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

Well I hate to mention it (again) but a MMORPG has to use game models that are like 1/10th the complexity of single-player games. *snip*.

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It's not about amount of polygons, but more about textures, shading and general art style. GW2 is a mmorpg too, yet wood there looks amazing and stone walls look like stone. Under dx9. Here dx11 fixes it for me, but hey, as long as there's a fix i'm happy.

I'll never grasp people's fascination/over-obsession on a game's water when judging graphics.. especially in games where water has little to zero significant impact on gameplay. It's water people. We spend 99.98% of our time on land and 97% of our time LOOKING at land.

To be honest, I don't see why parallax mapping techniques are even needed with tesselation implemented. I thought parallaxing was meant as a cheap way of adding depth to textured surfaces? Tesselation achieves the same thing but without cheating, so I don't understand why you'd do both - on some surfaces parallaxing would be a better choice, but for things such as rocky terrain and cobblestones tesselation is a much more believable solution on its own.

I did run the game in VSR at 3200x1800 for a while and honestly didn't see much of a performance hit - I'm fairly sure my CPU (4670k @ stock) is holding back the graphics card (R9 290) so any increase in load solely on the GPU is fine because it has free cycles anyway.

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Originally Posted by Havenae

I'll never grasp people's fascination/over-obsession on a game's water when judging graphics.. especially in games where water has little to zero significant impact on gameplay. It's water people. We spend 99.98% of our time on land and 97% of our time LOOKING at land.

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Limsa Lominsa, and the Fishing job says otherwise. Sure it's not Archeage with having actual maritime battles, but but there's still combat places in the game that have water like Leviathan primal and Satasha/Satasha Hard, Hullbreaker Isle, and the current Neverreap dungeon.

The obsession with water is because it's one of three "impossible" things to render accurately. The other two are fog and reflections.


https://youtu.be/qZFx-sLPtGs?t=38 Watch from 0:00:30 to 0:01:45 in Bioshock Infinite

Now watch the FFXIV V1.0 opening segment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0IofOyVIzw
Can you tell which part was pre-rendered?

These are both DX9.

Radiosity is what makes things "look realistic", because otherwise everything relies on self-illumination.
Liquid simulation is approaching having more realistic waves, but still doesn't reflect and disperse light like water would.
https://youtu.be/6WZZARzpckw

Game looks better than before. HBAO makes huge difference and I really like the uncompressed textures they look less blocky than before. Reflections are also nice when they work correctly. I see reflections on surfaces that they are not supposed to be like rocks, carpets etc. They need to fix this. New forms of AA should also be implemented. Water looks much much better now. Lighting is cool. What really this game needs is higher res textures. I can't stand those super low res textures on characters and surroundings. It looks like a hazy upscaled mess especially during cutscenes when the camera is close. They need to make a higher res texture pack for the PC. Consoles are fine as you usually play from far away on a TV and consoles cannot keep up with extra effects easily if not at all but PC is another story. We need higher res textures.

I can't really tell any significant different with DX11 either other than a drop in frame rate and stability.

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Originally Posted by Fynlar

I can't really tell any significant different with DX11 either other than a drop in frame rate and stability.

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Maybe your card doesn't support DX11?

I don't get why people thought DirectX11 would be akin to the Second Coming... that's not what DirectX does. That's what a graphics overhaul or update does. DirectX is a 'middle man'. Before Microsoft developed DirectX Windows had to deal directly with graphics card drivers. This was great... and terrible at the same time. If a game tried to do something that the graphics card couldn't it could result in the game freezing, crashing or Windows crashing altogether. DirectX is there for when a game asks for something the graphics card can't do, filling in as best it can. You still get freezes and crashes every so often but it's nowhere near as frequent. This is what DirectX is.

People who say they can't see difference with DX11 needs to either check their launcher settings, in game settings and their eyes. There is no possibility you can't see difference. Try turning down the DX11 specific features in game and you will see then. Double check you are actually running the DX11 version and your in game graphic settings. The most notable differences are the HBAO, water tessellation and parallax occlusion.

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Maybe your card doesn't support DX11?

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Nope, it does

OK still can't get over how unimpressive the DX11 water looks.

I linked this before,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAGmsJomTYM

Some say it's too much. (That said, it is a storm after all.)

But in real life,

https://www.facebook.com/OceanRealit...2305144992680/

That is kind of how water looks.

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Originally Posted by Bishop81

OK still can't get over how unimpressive the DX11 water looks.

I linked this before...

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heehee,

And I responded before that heavensward barely has any water in it, which is why devs haven't put any effort into new water effects. There is a small stream in two zones, a tiny lake with a river in another, and all of the other zones have only a few static ponds. They've said repeatedly that the effects they worked on for 3.0 were mostly lighting and shadow effects, because they wanted to nail the contrast of light and dark.

We'll see your pretty water effects in 4.0, I bet, assuming the expansion uses water the way rumors suggest.

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Originally Posted by Bishop81

OK still can't get over how unimpressive the DX11 water looks.

I linked this before,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAGmsJomTYM

Some say it's too much. (That said, it is a storm after all.)

But in real life,

https://www.facebook.com/OceanRealit...2305144992680/

That is kind of how water looks.

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Batman Arkham Knight runs like ass on most systems, and at times I struggle to stay at 40-60 FPS when it's crowded with FFXIV on a 290x. That sort of detail won't work with an MMO, but the water can and should be improved if the rumours are true about the next expansion's focus on water areas. Not to that extent though.

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Originally Posted by Gunspec

heehee,

And I responded before that heavensward barely has any water in it, which is why devs haven't put any effort into new water effects. There is a small stream in two zones, a tiny lake with a river in another, and all of the other zones have only a few static ponds. They've said repeatedly that the effects they worked on for 3.0 were mostly lighting and shadow effects, because they wanted to nail the contrast of light and dark.

We'll see your pretty water effects in 4.0, I bet, assuming the expansion uses water the way rumors suggest.

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Batman Arkham Knight doesn't have water segments either if I'm right. It takes place almost entirely in the city but yet has decent looking water.

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Originally Posted by Colorful

Batman Arkham Knight runs like ass on most systems, and at times I struggle to stay at 40-60 FPS when it's crowded with FFXIV on a 290x. That sort of detail won't work with an MMO, but the water can and should be improved if the rumours are true about the next expansion's focus on water areas. Not to that extent though.

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Arkham Knight doesn't run (worth a damn anyway) at all on PCs according to reviews - crash, crash, crash ...

But runs fine on the PS4,

https://youtu.be/Ra6iHmbHtbQ?t=6m40s

Are you telling me that a DX11 compliant GPU can't handle what the PS4 can?[1]

[1] It's even funnier as PC fanboys (not you) have been jumping at every opportunity to inform everyone how much better console games can look on the PC.

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Originally Posted by Bishop81

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You're right about Arkham running poorly on just about every PC that isn't a 2 Titan X setup, but I guess that's to blame on the outsourced port, although it's still better than what SE does most of the time. Type 0 for example, game looks awful and doesn't play all that well on my friend's setup, runs just fine here but that's a given. Can't even run FFXIII at any higher than 30 FPS because it restricts my GPU usage for some strange reason. SE really does baffle me sometimes.

As it stands FFXIV isn't the most well optimized game, but it doesn't need to be due to the dated visuals. Even in PS4 it barely manages 30 FPS IIRC, that should tell you the difference between the power required to run an MMO and a singleplayer game. It could be due to the PS4's weak CPU, but on my PC where I can monitor GPU usage is usually at 100% while CPU is pretty low so I doubt it.