FFXIV 1.0 graphics

[CrAZYVIC]

Even FFXI supported custom RES textures but ARR No... is really disappointing. They MUST add in DX11.

Low RES textures = 512 x 512
Medium = 1024 x 1024
High = 2048 x 2048
Maximun = 4096 x 4096

Yes adding this option to pc, will cause the ps3/ps4 version looks terrible outdated but why the PC users HAVE deal with the consoles limitations?

The best example for the people see this. Go to Middle la noscea and close up the Vegetation there, that looks HORRIBLE not even reach 512 x 512 res texture.

[Shioban]

Even FFXI supported custom RES textures but ARR No... is really disappointing. They MUST add in DX11.

Low RES textures = 512 x 512
Medium = 1024 x 1024
High = 2048 x 2048
Maximun = 4096 x 4096

Yes adding this option to pc, will cause the ps3/ps4 version looks terrible outdated but why the PC users HAVE deal with the consoles limitations?

The best example for the people see this. Go to Middle la noscea and close up the Vegetation there, that looks HORRIBLE not even reach 512 x 512 res texture.

Before you think i'm chasing your tail, i'm not. I'm trying to explain from their Point-Of-View (Personally i'd sacrifice the space for the textures)

Pretty much anything supports textures of up to 8192*8192, but the detail is un-nessecary.

Textures are meant to be subjective to the content.

And earring isn't going to have a 2048*2048 texture with decorating detail.

A 2048x2048 texture is pretty big, 4096x4096 is overall when it comes to actually trying to keep your overall build down in terms of space overall.
It's very easy for your simple build to beef out to hundreds of megabytes within a few models (even when compressed).

Average User Base
When 1.0 came out, most of the textures were only partially compressed (in some cases they weren't at all), which caused HUGE memory issues when it came to drawing the 3D scene, loading in a full set of high resolution textures takes pretty beefy hardware which the average user base simply didn't have, leaving most people to either adjust their settings (even with that memory consumption was high) or to simply avoid the game all together.

The best example for the people see this. Go to Middle la noscea and close up the Vegetation there, that looks HORRIBLE not even reach 512 x 512 res texture.

Topological Anti-Aliasing / Transparent Anti-Aliasing
The texture resolution could be a little higher here, but the main issue issue (comparing to 1.0) is the lack of Hardware Based Anti-Aliasing due to the fact that in DirectX 9 (due to the Deffered Rendering being used for light/shadows) Hardware Based Anti-aliasing simply doesn't work leaving a horrid jagged pixel edge to the foliage (which is only slightly more compressed than the 1.0 version of the textures).

FXAA sadly only runs a simple pass over the scene, which doesn't actually detect any transparent textures or true 3D edges think of it as a filter.

The DX11 client will fix this issue as the workaround for hardware anti-aliasing in a scene using deffered rendering was fixed.

How much is enough?
512x512 - 1024x1024 actually retains a fair bit of detail, as per the following example. With the sheer amount of gear in the game it's quite difficult to balance this, so the development team decided to compress some sections of the textures on gear and only partially reduce the detail in others (example bleow);




/Basicly/ [TLDR]

Square Enix as professional developers did what was nessecary to get the game running on an average base of computers to reel in as many players as possible which worked perfectly, on release all the players who said "Oh my god this actually runs now, OMG I'M AT 40-50FPS NOW!!!!" was exactly the reaction they wanted.
It's completely possible to fix this later on (but to do so would actually require a ton of work to reapply the original textures or use slightly less compressed versions)
The likelyhood is small, but what they did made sense and it has benefited the game in the long-run.