Square shows off DX12 Engine Demo - Will DX12 support be added for FFXIV?

Hi All,

Hajime Tabata from Square Enix showed off a DirectX 12 Engine Demo recently, which looks pretty impressive.

Is this something the Dev Team is looking to add support for in a future patch for FF XIV?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpDdOIZy-4k


Thanks!

I can't really tell a difference. I barely even noticed much with DirectX 11 on benchmark.

Bear in mind youtube always reduces the quality of streaming videos. Can't tell how good DX12 would be till your running it on your own setup.

Looks like their demo rig had four GTX Titans rendering that.

Won't make a difference, DirectX isn't some wonder tool. You want better looks graphics? Beg SE for higher resolution textures. That's where a lot of issues come from.

They said they have no plans to look at DX12 at this time.

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Originally Posted by Magis

Won't make a difference, DirectX isn't some wonder tool. You want better looks graphics? Beg SE for higher resolution textures. That's where a lot of issues come from.

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and the character models imho, showed my gf the 1.0 benchmark yesterday, she was blown away by it. I mean, I know what problems 1.0 had, but the character models and textures where top notch.

It prob won't be for ffxiv. More than likely newer titles like Star Ocean 5, Tomb Raider 2, and maybe Kingdom Hearts 3? One can hope anyway.

DX12 won't be used until it's needed, and it won't be needed for a long while.

It's 8k maps and high polygon assets making that visual happen. DX12 is just the bridge that all that data commutes across.

Game developers won't be held to that level of quality for a while I think.. it would be awesome -- I'm sure their artists would love to work at that resolution (8k *drool), but the standard isn't there yet, and no developer spends money on their Art Departments unless they have to.

They'd rather waste money on PR and Marketing. #IHateYouEA

I don't think we'll see DX12 implementation any time in the future. Maybe many years down the road and if SE updates the textures of FFXIV or not. Currently I don't think this game is looking dated at all in comparison to other MMORPG's in the market. It has its own art style and aesthetic design choices that make it unique to say something like ESO or Guild Wars 2 and colors are bright and vibrant and pop out quite nicely. I don't think FFXIV is going to age as poorly as FFXI did in the visual department.

Even if the entire PC playerbase of this game could somehow afford a computer expensive enough to run DX12, no one on PS4 would be able to.

I wouldn't expect DX12 to be actually used in games, or to be widely used like DX11 is now, for many years down the road.

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Originally Posted by HaiHai

Even if the entire PC playerbase of this game could somehow afford a computer expensive enough to run DX12, no one on PS4 would be able to.

I wouldn't expect DX12 to be actually used in games, or to be widely used like DX11 is now, for many years down the road.

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It would still support DX9 for people that can't use the updated DX12 engine. It wouldn't be like people that can't keep an up-to-date gaming PC will be left out of the game entirely. As for the console gamers that play this game that's just one of the unfortunate side effects of consoles in general. They tend to show their age as the years go on. The PS4 version will look the same in 8 years from now and will still be running at the same resolution/frame rate as it does now whereas the PC version could in theory be running at 4k, 8k, etc at 60+ fps while the console version is still at 1080p.

The single biggest change between any Directx version is pipeline efficiency, but DX11 to DX12 really drilled down and focused on that portion of the graphics problem. There's not actually a lot that DX12 does that DX11 doesn't do, the difference is the massive performance improvements between the two. DX12 moved almost all of the function overhead to the GPU and made what was left highly parallel. Generally speaking, games can look a lot better on DX12 than DX11, but not because it offers any new technology, it just finally allows developers to stretch their wings more.

In the context of FFXIV, the developers have stretched their wings just about as much as they feel comfortable doing. Thus, not likely to see any real improvement even if the game was rebuilt using DX12.

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Originally Posted by Catwho

Looks like their demo rig had four GTX Titans rendering that.

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yup lol

/10char

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Originally Posted by seraf

I don't think we'll see DX12 implementation any time in the future. Maybe many years down the road and if SE updates the textures of FFXIV or not. Currently I don't think this game is looking dated at all in comparison to other MMORPG's in the market. It has its own art style and aesthetic design choices that make it unique to say something like ESO or Guild Wars 2 and colors are bright and vibrant and pop out quite nicely. I don't think FFXIV is going to age as poorly as FFXI did in the visual department.

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What you talking about lol FFXI has aged quite well in the visual department, the art style is incredibly strong still and on PC at least you can go super high rez with the polygons, it's pretty much as if it was an HD remaster w/out some of the tricks devs do.

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Originally Posted by Whocareswhatmynameis

It prob won't be for ffxiv. More than likely newer titles like Star Ocean 5, Tomb Raider 2, and maybe Kingdom Hearts 3? One can hope anyway.

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More than likely not for any games currently already at advanced stages of development, so no KH3.
Unless you want more delays!

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Originally Posted by Magis

Won't make a difference, DirectX isn't some wonder tool. You want better looks graphics? Beg SE for higher resolution textures. That's where a lot of issues come from.

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Nope.

What would make a difference is getting rid of textures entirely and actually rendering materials with the properties of materials, not simulating it with muddy lossy-compression textures.

But we're not yet at a point where we can render a million hairs on someones head and face in real time. A lot of what you see in 3D games, past and present is "baked" into the geometry and textures. The pony tails on the female characters hair in FFXIV and other games is just a few dozen polygons and some tesselation, not thousands of polygons. They only have very limited physics movements because the hair doesn't bend like "hair" it bends like a banana. Likewise you see similar problems with how Miqo'te tails clip through just about everything. Likewise with Healer weapons clipping though everything. The renderer isn't rendering fabric, it's just putting both objects in a space that overlaps.

If you want to see "cool stuff" look up Ray Tracing with Radiosity. That stuff is impressive, but not being done on GPU's. But look at some of those samples and some of them are indistinguishable from photos.

So while this DX12 demo may look cool, it's impractical for a MMO, except during maybe a cutscene where the developer can limit the geometry presented to make it fluid. Square has been showing us stuff like this ever since the FF6 SGI demo, something cutting edge that never actually makes it into a game. Remember the FF7 PS3 demo? Maybe in 20 years we will see a FF7 remake.

And to be fair, we were never promised a DirectX10/11 version of FFXIV in V1.0, We were only suggested that a DX11 version may come out at a later date (eg when PS4 came out), because DX11 was already out at the time V1 was shut down. DirectX9 will still work on Windows 95 (because it was released in 2004) DX11 was released in 2009, a year before FFXIV V1.0 came out.

What I think DX12 may allow some studios like Square Enix to do is to not spend thousands of CPU hours rendering the high resolution movies - only to have a script change and have to scrap it and start over.

This essentially reduces the amount of time/effort required to create fully CG rendered cutscenes, which means we might see more of them spliced in between standard DX11 gameplay.