Quote Originally Posted by Hali View Post
That's completely false, it's a partial code adjustment. NOT a complete engine re-write, that's a complete fallacy.

It's a simple render priority fix and a few other minor adjustments. It's not that big of a deal to adjust. I can assure you. It's something that every major company that wanted to add Hardware AA had to do.

As professionals, they're entirely aware of the process needed to do this, well within their capabilities.
It's way more than an adjustment. It would require a rewrite of the graphic pipeline, which while is not a total engine rewrite, is anything but trivial.

Not to mention that the lighting engine would in fact need a total rewrite and then most of the pixel shaders would need to be rewritten as well.

This is all assuming forward rendering would actually be suitable and workable for a game like Final Fantasy 14. Franky, it likely is not simply because of the massive object density hundreds of player models create. A single light source would likely bring a forward rendering engine to its knees in this type of common scenario that is found in the game. The deferred shading allows FF14 to cast multiple light sources on a large amount of objects with relatively low impact on performance. You would need a ridiculous amount of hardware just to brute force this and we haven't even gotten into the performance hit that even 2x sampled AA would bring into this scenario.

And to top it all off, DX11 really offers nothing in the way of performance enhancements that will alleviate this issue. DX12 might, in theory, but nobody as really played around with it enough to be sure.

As others have already mentioned, if you have the hardware, supersampling is going to be a better option here. Fortunately the UI even scales well so it actually works very will with FF14 with some very pleasing results.