please Yoshi, give the dx11 version TXAA

[Sumii]

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.

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.

[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.

[Sajittarius]

Wow i didnt expect my comment to get more than a few views

To the person who says 32xAA works, go into Quarrymill and look at the light hitting the metal on top of the gates.. If you dont see jaggies tell me your settings so i can try them, lol

The specular aliasing is pretty bad. I got used to it and then played Assassins Creed 4 and the TXAA blew me away. AC4 without AA looks like FFXIV to me.

[Laraul]

I've never heard of TXAA. Doing a search for it yields a link to an NVidia page that talks about how it's used in one game (Assassin's Creed IV). It also includes footnote:

NOTE: TXAA is only supported on NVIDIA® Kepler™ GPUs and will require a GTX 600–series graphics card, or higher, to enable the feature in the game's graphics options. If you do not have the requirements to enable TXAA, the option will be hidden. TXAA is not properly observed with static screen shots, only with scenes in motion.

MSAA won't work of course because it only works on an image before any of the post processing effects have been applied. SSAA is incredibly resource intensive. So you are left with FXAA, which is fast, applies to the image after post processing, and provides quality near to that of SSAA. It's why it's the AA technique used by most every game today. And regardless of what AA you use, you'll always have some jaggies here and there. Unless you want your screen to look like a big smudge.

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?

What "nasty low res textures" are you referring too exactly? I haven't seen any ugly textures in the game. Maybe it's your monitor.

When people ask for things like this, they are always being speculative, assuming that if this is done, the game's image quality will improve. But in practice, just adding fancily named anti-aliasing measures isn't practical or possible.

[Shioban]

MSAA won't work of course because it only works on an image before any of the post processing effects have been applied. SSAA is incredibly resource intensive. So you are left with FXAA, which is fast, applies to the image after post processing, and provides quality near to that of SSAA.

FXAA, in particular to that of the setting Square Enix are using is horrible compared to MSAA/SSAA/SMAA

SSAA/SMAA although intensive are great to use, if the option is provided it would be nice to utilise them, the idea of the Directx 11 client would be bells and whistles above and beyond the recommended 'high performance' route, this would be one of them.

MSAA can work, it just requires a bit of adjustment, this has been tried and tested, whether Square Enix would be bothered or not to do this is another question.

What "nasty low res textures" are you referring too exactly? I haven't seen any ugly textures in the game. Maybe it's your monitor.

Compared to 1.23 quite a lot of the textures were heavily reduced, more-so for characters. Hair, bodies and gear in general were reduced to favour memory reduction, generally affecting the look of them. They're not nasty by any mean but it is noticeable. It's mostly with

Monitor? lolwut?

[Laraul]

Compared to 1.23 quite a lot of the textures were heavily reduced, more-so for characters. Hair, bodies and gear in general were reduced to favour memory reduction, generally affecting the look of them. They're not nasty by any mean but it is noticeable.

People complained about the graphics in 1.0 all the time. People always find *something* wrong that needs improved with games' graphics.

I don't care how large textures you use. When you zoom in close enough with the camera, they may not look as crisp. I think the overall appearance of characters has improved since 1.0. Your claim that character textures have been heavily reduced doesn't match up with what 1.0 looked like compared to 2.0. When viewed from a far, character textures looked very good. But get too close they become pixelated. With 2.0 I haven't seen this issue crop up. At least not to point where it was as noticeable as it once was.

Also, 1.0's world textures looked more heavily stretched in a few areas. Other times the appeared amazing crisp.

Bad Dream Cutscene
Garuda Battle (Easy)

You claimed early that a 512x512 resolution texture would always look like "utter crap." Yet, each of those images aren't much larger than that. 512 is nearly have the vertical space of 1080. And honestly I can't say that symbol in the middle of the robe looks exactly awful.

Why do you complain about this, but not the small "40x40" resolution icons the game uses for actions and inventory items? I those small icons are ugly. Compared to the 128x128 icons found in the database.

[Shioban]

From 1.0...

Bad Dream Cutscene
Garuda Battle (Easy)

And I don't care how large textures you use. When you zoom in close enough with the camera, they may not look as crisp.

You claimed early that a 512x512 resolution texture would always look like "utter crap." Yet, each of those images aren't much larger than that. 512 is nearly have the vertical space of 1080. And honestly I can't say that symbol in the middle of the robe looks exactly awful.

Why do you complain about this, but not the small "40x40" resolution icons the game uses for actions and inventory items? I those small icons are ugly. Compared to the 128x128 icons found in the database.

I think you read it wrong, or I typed it wrong.

Textures are dependant on the object they're situated on.

An earring won't require a 512x512 or 1024x1024 texture.

An example where texture resolution matters is for example here;

A lower-resolution diffuse/bump map has caused the pix-elated look you see here resulting in the odd artifacting on the skin, this didn't exist in 1.23 as much as they used a higher resolution texture where detail mattered. For 'memory resourcefullness' they've compressed a lot of the textures at the expense of detail, in some cases where they really shouldn't have.

Example;




For comparison 1.23;