Anyone else underwhelmed by the new DX 11 graphics?

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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.