Quote Originally Posted by Shioban View Post
I really don't want to have to load in a model of mine and show you the difference.

But if I have a 1.2 million poly object, with a 512x512 texture. It will look like utter crap, not matter what.

The poly-count can provide a 'depth reference' which is why we use normal maps, but that detail means nothing when your pix-elated diffuse texture is shrouding the surface.
Obviously, you know more on the subject that I do, as I only dabble in my free time. That being said, while I agree with you practically speaking, what I was saying was that in the perfect world (quite impossible, mind you), everything would be a simple diffuse color, and all "texture" would be due to lighting and material physics, as it is in the real world.

Back in the real world, of course higher resolution textures make an enormous difference. FFXIV is pretty intensive on the dynamic lighting though; walking through Gridania at night I count at least 5-6 dynamic light sources at any given time in some areas. That sort of lighting will produce polynomial - possibly even exponential - levels of stress on the GPU as a function of the complexity of the textures. If they want to maintain their minimum specs, they'll have to lower the number of dynamic lights in each area in order to increase texture size, unless the optimization in DX11 is much more significant than I had thought.