please Yoshi, give the dx11 version TXAA

[Kittra]

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.

They could just give us more customization options so that we could specify the maximum number of dynamic light sources, or maybe something of a performance adjuster... new benchmark to help adjust system settings?

One of the things Yoshi P promised us was that people with higher end PCs would be able to play at higher quality without needing to fear being held back by the PS3 or users on lower end systems.
To date, I have heard nothing but "PS3 limitations" and "Lower end systems" as an excuse as to why they cannot up the quality of the game and it saddens me greatly.

DX11 was my last hope, I was expecting to get better textures/character lighting when it came about, but so far it's looking like nothing but enhanced environmental lighting, which we have plenty of already.

[Kittra]

~trust me this is my job.

What field of work is that exactly?

Just curious

[Shioban]

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.

One would think that the rendering impact of lights would drag the system down ~but~ deffered rendering is delicious in that you could throw 50 lights into a scene all flying all over the place and the difference will be negigible.
Hence why when you cast a spell, use certain abilities and more have their own light-source.

But yes, they wanted to hit the target market for hardware and they did! It's paid off in the long-run, but that doesn't mean they can't expand further.

The impact would be pretty much the same if you had 6 lights compared to just one being raycasted onto a bump/specular map, that's the beauty of using them in deffered rendering.

They could just give us more customization options so that we could specify the maximum number of dynamic light sources, or maybe something of a performance adjuster... new benchmark to help adjust system settings?

One of the things Yoshi P promised us was that people with higher end PCs would be able to play at higher quality without needing to fear being held back by the PS3 or users on lower end systems.
To date, I have heard nothing but "PS3 limitations" and "Lower end systems" as an excuse as to why they cannot up the quality of the game and it saddens me greatly.

DX11 was my last hope, I was expecting to get better textures/character lighting when it came about, but so far it's looking like nothing but enhanced environmental lighting, which we have plenty of already.

Essentially, yes. You can just add in an adjustment for quality settings as with anything which is (from what I read) what they intend to do.

Considering DX11 boasts much better lighting/shadow casting it would be a huge waste not to take advantage of the new shaders and tricks and treats it offers when a fair number of your customers can actually support it these days.

After reviewing the mechanics of deferred lighting, I need to amend my previous comment. Deferred lighting actually greatly side-steps quite a bit of the computational overhead when dealing with large texture sizes. Given that, I'd say the largest contributor to the lack of HD textures is the amount of work involved in upgrading the new models to be on par with the old ones. That being said, I am always inclined to believe that the producers of a game know more about the construction of that game than even very skilled consumers. I like to believe that if Yoshi-P says it isn't the best direction for FFXIV, he has some inkling what he is talking about. Naive? Perhaps, but it certainly makes things all rosy colored.

You're right, their judgment is best, but seeing as other companies have trialed this and succeeded in doing this, it seems an awful waste.

It would also hing on /how/ they actually handle textures when creating content. Whether it's set to a 'quality-tag' or if they manually adjusted the textures for each model.
In an ideal world you would world you can work to a certain quality and adjust the final export to use the compressed version of the textures instead (depends on the toolset/production method)

It might have been something the development team decided and told Yoshida "This is how we want to do it" and it's now cannon fact.

But essentially each texture has its own memory footprint. A diffuse and sometimes a normal/specular map. Normal/Specular maps don't eat up as much memory as a diffuse texture for the most-part as they generally hold less colour information (i.e. less data). So one of the other concerns is the memory impact of the textures in the scene over-all i'd wager.
I personally don't know the impact of the textures in FFXIV, it could already be fairly high so I might be blowing a trumpet on 'Give me better textures' when the option simply isn't viable.

The rendering impact of ray-casting the lighting for the bump and specular maps generally isn't that heavy in deffered rendering, obviously the quality of this changes the rendering impact.

What field of work is that exactly?

Just curious

Video Games~

[Hulan]

But essentially each texture has its own memory footprint. A diffuse and sometimes a normal/specular map. Normal/Specular maps don't eat up as much memory as a diffuse texture for the most-part as they generally hold less colour information (i.e. less data). So one of the other concerns is the memory impact of the textures in the scene over-all i'd wager.
I personally don't know the impact of the textures in FFXIV, it could already be fairly high so I might be blowing a trumpet on 'Give me better textures' when the option simply isn't viable.

The rendering impact of ray-casting the lighting for the bump and specular maps generally isn't that heavy in deffered rendering, obviously the quality of this changes the rendering impact.

Yep, I may make bad assumptions from time to time, but while I don't specialize in CG, I am a fairly competent (if you'll excuse the hubris) computer scientist that dabbles in CG, so I can at least extrapolate the concepts. Is it possible the number of draw calls would cause an issue with older 512MB GPUs? FFXIV has some of the most non-static objects per scene I've seen in any game I can think of, even counting MMOs. That could be one of the things limiting their choices for texture size.

Not necessarily on topic, but I saw this and wanted to make mention of something.

Minimum specs requirement should have nothing to do with the DX11 client. They are not changing the DX9 client over to DX11 and dropping it, but rather giving customers the option to run a more graphic intensive client. If someone wants to complain about not being able to use the DX11 client when they have the DX9 client, that is all on the consumer to upgrade their hardware. If SE was replacing the DX9 client with DX11 that'd be something else entirely, but Yoshi has said that it will be a whole other release client.

I suspect you aren't appreciated the complexity change involved here. When I made that comment, I had forgotten they were using deferred lighting. If, as I thought, they were using some form of vertex lighting, even just doubling the size of the textures would result in 1/64 the performance of the lighting. That would cause even the best GPUs a little concern. I said minimum to be generous, truthfully, that kind of naive change would throttle virtually any system. But it's a moot point, because fortunately, they are using deferred lighting, for all of it's foibles, it is very fast.

[Shioban]

Yep, I may make bad assumptions from time to time, but while I don't specialize in CG, I am a fairly competent (if you'll excuse the hubris) computer scientist that dabbles in CG, so I can at least extrapolate the concepts. Is it possible the number of draw calls would cause an issue with older 512MB GPUs?

The idea of having two separate clients is to avoid these issues;

"But my GPU only had 512MB of memory! < Use the DX9 client please"

The idea of this new update is for PCs that can handle this, as for draw calls there's been worse, much much worse. Thanks to the really nice low-poly design of pretty much every object in-game, the lighting trickery to disguise this fact and the compressed textures this won't be an issue. Essentially the poly-count for the average character in FFXIV is almost half of that of a normal character, making it rather efficient hence their 100 characters on screen at once limitation.


In terms of GPU/CPU processing time, FFXIV is actually quite efficient, this wouldn't be substantially changed with a change in texture resolution, the impact would be placed more heavily on the memory as the processing time for positional updates wouldn't change considerably.

Of course if you slapped 2048x2048 textures on everything with the 100 character count surrounded by lights flailing all over the scene (similar to your average FATE), then yes it'll lag you can't avoid that, but thankfully Square Enix are stubborn and as nice as the DX11 update will be they'll cut corners and round it off as much as they can for the sake of performance.


The texture choice still isn't clear to me, I don't completely understand why they decided not to update the currently (and sometimes heavily) compressed textures.

[Kittra]

Thanks to the really nice low-poly design of pretty much every object in-game, the lighting trickery to disguise this fact and the compressed textures this won't be an issue. Essentially the poly-count for the average character in FFXIV is almost half of that of a normal character, making it rather efficient hence their 100 characters on screen at once limitation.

By that, do you mean that each displayed character besides your own is half the poly count or that the 2.0 character poly count is half of what 1.0's poly count was?

If it's just a case of the poly count being half of 1.0's then I wish they would give us an enhanced count in the DX11 client.
1.0's characters models were far better looking than 2.0's currently are in my opinion.

[Shioban]

By that, do you mean that each displayed character besides your own is half the poly count or that the 2.0 character poly count is half of what 1.0's poly count was?

If it's just a case of the poly count being half of 1.0's then I wish they would give us an enhanced count in the DX11 client.
1.0's characters models were far better looking than 2.0's currently are in my opinion.

I mean in comparison to that of other games. The FFXIV development team have done a fantastic job at keeping the polycount down whilst retaining enough detail to let the bump-maps do their job.

Any example of a process similar to FFXIV (although with a metric-ton more poly detail on the far left model for some reason)



I'd show you what I mean in terms of the polycount for FFXIVs characters, but i'd get into some serious trouble~

But, the overall polycount for /most/ things did change a bit from 1.0, but in the case of characters it doesn't appear to have changed, and if it has it was only slight after poking, prying and comparing.
1.0 had a much brighter lighting overall, no matter where you were, this created the illusion that the models were more detailed than they actually were, at the expense of giving it that overly bright look, which leads /alot/ of people to notice that the models in the new deffered rendering system that they aren't actually that high (in terms of polygons).

But this doesn't matter too much, a low-poly model with a nice bump-map can make a huge difference.