What exactly is this Direct X 11 and what will it do?

[Shougun]

There will be a cost though, loading textures from main memory (or even hard disk) isn't free. You pay for it with longer load times.

Is it worth it for the few moments where your camera does end up close to a surface?

I'm not saying blurry textures are good, they aren't. Just that there is a price to pay for good textures.

Oh yeah definitely there is always a cost to quality (and some qualities are too expensive), I wouldn't include a super highres in the default package but to say they don't matter. . . ?

I don't know about the average PC setup, but I'm pretty sure my PC could handle another GB or two and not care (GPU, not referring HDD/SSD). Would take a lot of work to repackage an enthusiast texture pack, a lot (unless already ready, for some reason), but I still don't think it is fair to say textures are not important anymore. Which again could be my misinterpretation of what he said. Lighting and mappings (technically comes in a resolution) are obviously important too.

[Bishop81]

Oh yeah definitely there is always a cost to quality (and some qualities are too expensive), I wouldn't include a super highres in the default package but to say they don't matter. . . ?
...

Well ... given that the camera is at a distant most of the time ...does it really matter that much?

Also I wonder with DX11 coming, how much VRAM they really have to spare. DX11 effects might end up using even more memory (more and higher quality render targets).

Increase texture resolution also means you have to add more mipmaps to prevent texture aliasing - that obviously cost memory too. (To be blunt, FFXIV could use a few more mipmaps, or maybe it's just the LoD bias set wrong, as texture aliasing is quite severe as it is.)

FFXIV to my knowledge uses about 600-900MiB of VRAM at the moment. I have a 2GiB card. How much of an improvement will we see if they double the number of pixels in the textures ... it's hard to tell - might even be barely noticeable.

[Shougun]

Well ... given that the camera is at a distant most of the time ...does it really matter that much?
Also I wonder with DX11 coming, how much VRAM they really have to spare. DX11 effects might end up using even more memory (more and higher quality render targets).
Increase texture resolution also means you have to add more mipmaps to prevent texture aliasing - that obviously cost memory too. (To be blunt, FFXIV could use a few more mipmaps, or maybe it's just the LoD bias set wrong, as texture aliasing is quite severe as it is.)
FFXIV to my knowledge uses about 600-900MiB of VRAM at the moment. I have a 2GiB card. How much of an improvement will we see if they double the number of pixels in the textures ... it's hard to tell - might even be barely noticeable.

My Camera isn't at a distance all the time though XD. I'm tight on the shoulder or for the fun of it FPS'ing it up, when not in combat. Maybe I'm playing the game wrong lol.

Also Bethesda mods have taught me when it doesn't look pretty throw bigger numbers* at it, 4096x4096 everything! Candle? 4096. Cloud? 4096! Whats that, you can see the pixels on your flora? Redo the model and 4096! Ok well maybe not that far.. but.. I've seen the power of the numbers XD (also that is a srpg game designed for fps/tight shoulder, so again maybe I just play FFXIV wrong lol).

*And an ENB

[Hollowed]

snip

This was a really good read! I do hope we get a lot of this with the new client!

[Riardon]

Either translation failed from Japanese or Yoshida tried to justify their actions with the graphic quality with some exaggerated little lies. I think this happened because they year in a tight time limit to release ARR after the fail of 1.0 so they had to decide and cut down some things to release it faster. (smaller areas, loads of cutscenes without audio, low res textures and missing features from 1.0) and ofc console limitations. As for PC it's a different client and you can always customize your graphic settings depending on your GPU. I would like to see higher quality textures and effects even though many ppl don't have the pc specs to run it. But PC is all about freedom of choice. Tweak your settings and get the quality/performance ratio you want.

[coldreactive]

*And an ENB

Good thing FFXIV can use ENBs right now. Though doing so may cause Carbuncles and summons to become 1000W Bulbs.

[Squa11_Leonhart]

Either translation failed from Japanese or Yoshida tried to justify their actions with the graphic quality with some exaggerated little lies. I think this happened because they year in a tight time limit to release ARR after the fail of 1.0 so they had to decide and cut down some things to release it faster. (smaller areas, loads of cutscenes without audio, low res textures and missing features from 1.0) and ofc console limitations. As for PC it's a different client and you can always customize your graphic settings depending on your GPU. I would like to see higher quality textures and effects even though many ppl don't have the pc specs to run it. But PC is all about freedom of choice. Tweak your settings and get the quality/performance ratio you want.

The cuts to fidelity were for 2 reasons

1. They killed most pc's performance wise
2. The ps3 doesn't have the ram to load such high res textures and zone data.

[CGMidlander]

The cuts to fidelity were for 2 reasons

1. They killed most pc's performance wise
2. The ps3 doesn't have the ram to load such high res textures and zone data.

A lot of PC games have texture quality settings that can be changed. FFXIV has it strangely absent.

[Wildsprite]

A lot of PC games have texture quality settings that can be changed. FFXIV has it strangely absent.

now that you mention it I think XI has limited texture quality settings in it, I wonder why XIV doesn't....hmm

[Squa11_Leonhart]

There will be a cost though, loading textures from main memory (or even hard disk) isn't free. You pay for it with longer load times.

loading would probably be faster because it takes far longer to read small files from a HDD than it does bigger files.