Any news on DX11 version?

[Shioban]

If they aren't upgrading the textures then what will DX11 do for the game? Help it run smoother?

They're considering adding in a High Resolution Texture Pack(s) option for FFXIV, whether this gets added to the DX11 client or as a separate patch option isn't known.
Last we heard they were in the discussion/planning/debating stages as to whether they had the actual technical capacity to do it.

MMO's have A LOT of assets to render live, consider the amount of animations, models, sounds, textures, particles and various other data constantly loading in and out of the system. Balancing between detail/performance is important, so a high-resolution texture pack would have to be approached very carefully in regards to this.

DX11 however offers the following (and more, I've only listed a few things);

Improved Performance
Improved map rendering (bump/normal/specular/parallax/vertex/displacement mapping)
Improved asset rendering pipeline
Drastically Improved Alpha Sorting
Additional components added to DX11
Considerably more expansive and robust shader systems and shader rendering
Overall Better Lighting Shadow Casting/Rendering
DX based Tesselation support
DX based DoF support
Displacement Shaders
Shader Model 5.0

Overall DX11 is considerably easier to work with and manipulate from a development stand-point, so tricking the hardware into doing what you actually want it to do is much easier than it was with DX9/10.


But basicly;
DX11 is less about "More Performance" and more about "This is easier to work with, and we get lots of new shiny tools to play with".



DX11 HAS NO ACTUAL BEARING ON THE HIGH RESOLUTION TEXTURE PACK.
Technically the texture pack could easily be done in DX9, they're just considering releasing the textures along side the DX11 client (or even bundled with it)