please Yoshi, give the dx11 version TXAA

[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.