please Yoshi, give the dx11 version TXAA

[Kelg]

You cannot force hardware based AA in Deffered Rending in DX9, even with the AMD/Nvidia control panel over-ride settings.
For this to work it would require some input from Square Enix unless we're given the rights and tools to do it ourselves.

The only explained entry i've seen on tricking hardware based anti-aliasing into working in a DirectX9 environment using deffered rendering is this one;

Speak for yourself, it works just fine for me. I have no jaggies and the AA looks a lot better than vanilla.

[Naunet]

While I'm sure the super anti-aliasing / DX10 particles will be all so wonderful, isn't anyone a bit disappointed by the fact that they're not increasing the base resolution of those nasty low res textures? Yoshi already said specifically they're not increasing resolution at all and just adding on more 'layers of FX' so to speak. I'm sure no jaggies will be nicer, just sad that the characters won't have the same clarity/definition that they did in 1.x or better.

Yes, I'm disappointed in the persistence of the low resolution textures. They could very easily provide more in-depth graphic adjustment options to allow for the display of full high resolution textures in the game.

[Shioban]

Speak for yourself, it works just fine for me. I have no jaggies and the AA looks a lot better than vanilla.

I'm just saying how it works.

If you believe it's worked for you that's great, but for everyone else it just simply doesn't work based on how it renders the depth of the scene, trust me this is my job.

Without a butt-load of code adjustment you simply can't use hardware based anti-aliasing with deffered rending in DirectX 9 which is something FFXIV simply hasn't done.

However if you've forced FXAA, this will work as it's an overlaying filter which is why it works with any programme, this is NOT hardware based anti-aliasing.
If you try to force any of the hardware based AA options (try turning FXAA off first, you'll notice it has no effect.

[Kittra]

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.

Well I was holding out for the DX11 improvements but... if it's really not going to change anything but the environmental lighting (which is already very good) then I'm not sure what I'm really looking forward to now... patch 2.1, bah! Humbug!

I believe the current texture resolution cap is 2048x2048, but to put this in perspective, FFXI's maximum texture resolution is 2048x2048 as well, and we've been asking for an enhancement to that since 2005...

[Shioban]

I believe the current texture resolution cap is 2048x2048, but to put this in perspective, FFXI's maximum texture resolution is 2048x2048 as well, and we've been asking for an enhancement to that since 2005...

Those settings aren't indicative of the actual size of the textures in FFXI, that setting actually means something else, however;

Each individual texture has it's own resolution, 2048x2048 is pretty big actually for a texture, only things that actually need the finite detail should be at this resolution, textures can scale accordingly which for example in this image;

The red emblem has been compressed, whilst the rest of the gear retains a higher resolution.
The skin on the character, comparably has a higher resolution.

Most of the gear in FFXIV has been 'segmented' so they can compress individual sections of things to reduce the memory impact.

[Sadly, the problem is in some cases they've lowered it too much, making some of the textures too pix-elated.



For example;
(Not a great example)

4096 > 8192 are possible, but very unnecessary for most scenarios, most graphics cards can easily handle texture like that, but in terms of memory usage it's completely pointless in-game that sort of fidelity isn't needed.


Most textures in ARR are sitting in at around 128x128>1024x1024. I'd dare say very few if any reach 2048x2048, as most textures are repeatable, meaning you can have it at 512x512 but repeat the texture scale twice, giving it the 'illusion' of 1024x1024

[Hulan]

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.

[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

[Hulan]

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.

[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~