Regarding: DirectX Shutdown and General Drawing Quality

To clarify a few issues that I've found, I decided to make a post to maybe answer a few questions in effort to reduce the amount of new threads.

When playing FFXIV in full screen mode, minimizing the games causes a Direct X shut down. This means whenever in full screen mode, if you have to minimize, or something pops up that minimizes the game, you will need to relog. A fix for this, is to just play the game in windowed mode, and for the full fullscreen effect, use a windower.

As far as the General Drawing Quality bug, as far as I have seen, and with the people I talked to, the General Drawing Quality setting, under the Video Settings tab in the FFXIV config, can only go to Standard (8) max. Being placed in higher, as in High (9) or Highest (10), will result in hindered gameplay.

I hope this helps a few people!

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Originally Posted by Daku_Naito

To clarify a few issues that I've found, I decided to make a post to maybe answer a few questions in effort to reduce the amount of new threads.

When playing FFXIV in full screen mode, minimizing the games causes a Direct X shut down. This means whenever in full screen mode, if you have to minimize, or something pops up that minimizes the game, you will need to relog. A fix for this, is to just play the game in windowed mode, and for the full fullscreen effect, use a windower.

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This has been posted a ton of times, but I guess once more can not hurt.
Should be a well known issue by now that the game does not support alt+tab while in fullscreen.

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Originally Posted by Daku_Naito

As far as the General Drawing Quality bug, as far as I have seen, and with the people I talked to, the General Drawing Quality setting, under the Video Settings tab in the FFXIV config, can only go to Standard (8) max. Being placed in higher, as in High (9) or Highest (10), will result in hindered gameplay.

I hope this helps a few people!

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I am not sure of what bug it is you are speaking of?
A GDQ of 9 means the engine is rendering the frame in a buffer that is 1.5 times your resolution, and a GDQ of 10 makes the buffer 2 times your screen resolution.

If you are running a resolution of 1920x1080 at a GDQ of 10 (which is the standard resolution used by a lot of people by now) the engine would render at 3840x2160.
That takes a very powerful graphics card to pull off.

Having slowdowns when using a GDQ above 8 is normal unless you are running a very powerful graphics solution (with plenty of vram).

GDQ is a huge resource hog, mines set to 9 (because 8 is far to ugly for me with chained armor it just sparkles), my GPU could easily handle GDQ at 10 but my card is only the 1GB version.

There isn't a massive diff between GDQ 8 & 9 just clearer graphics and less jaggies but it requires much more power and Vram to run, on GDQ 8 my card uses 770 mb of Vram in Uldah, at 9 it uses 900mb Vram (thats without AA)

I've heard tons of people have this problem, I can definitely run x2. I could run x3 easily.

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There isn't a massive diff between GDQ 8 & 9 just clearer graphics and less jaggies but it requires much more power and Vram to run, on GDQ 8 my card uses 770 mb of Vram in Uldah, at 9 it uses 900mb Vram (thats without AA)

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What about GDQ10 w/ DoF enabled? Going above eight with DoF or AO enabled does cause a considerable performance impact.

What is the real difference? I am running SLI, and all it does is bug out for me. Maybe Nvidia optimization?

Edit: It seems the problem is with Ambient Occlusion, with it off there is no difference and I can do GDQ to 10 which improves the games quality. Also if you are running a Nvidia card, try using the Nvidia settings to override the game settings, it will improve performance.