Thread: FFXIV 1.0 graphics

Originally Posted by BobbinT

What are your specs back then?

Besides, I think you tweaked your configuration wrong. Even on my laptop which has Core2Duo 1.6 mhz with Nvidia G210M, I still could manage getting good graphic.

This is example taken from my laptop:


And here's me saying goodbye to 1.0 forever on Dec 31, 2012 23:57

This I'm having trouble believing. My laptop (core i5 M450 and a geforce 310m) couldn't pull that off without the frame rate dropping below 5FPS and overheating within a couple minutes. Low settings at native resolution didn't really have a huge improvement either and it looked like ass. I could've maybe pushed 15-18 frames with the lowest settings (which I believe Felis had in the screenshot), but that's about it. 1.XX's graphics engine was too resource intensive for laptops with the lowest end 200 and 300 series GPUs.

Originally Posted by File2ish

This I'm having trouble believing. My laptop (core i5 M450 and a geforce 310m) couldn't pull that off without the frame rate dropping below 5FPS and overheating within a couple minutes. Low settings at native resolution didn't really have a huge improvement either and it looked like ass. I could've maybe pushed 15-18 frames with the lowest settings (which I believe Felis had in the screenshot), but that's about it. 1.XX's graphics engine was too resource intensive for laptops with the lowest end 200 and 300 series GPUs.

Unfortunately I have already uninstalled 1.0 from my laptop, or else I could screenshot my config. But there are configuration outside and inside game you can disable back then to give quite big performance. Shadow is always a big resource taker for one. I also remembered disabling extra stuff like PhysX-like stuff. But believe me, it's possible.

Here's more example from my laptop:

Day 1 raiding when Castrum Novum released back then:


Here's another from end of era event:


EDIT:

This is from old lodestone guide:
http://lodestone.finalfantasyxiv.com.../config01.html

That is the ingame graphical setting. I disabled Character Shadows, Dust Effects, Extended Drawing, & Physics.

as for configs outside game:
http://lodestone.finalfantasyxiv.com...vi/envi05.html

Unfortunately I don't remember specific setting for that. But at least I can make it so that it doesn't looked blocky like what @Felis posted, that one just plainly bad, I won't even consider playing it. lol

You people have distorted memories of the original FFXIV. The overall appearance of the game has improved. While FFXIV had what appeared to be high detailed textures, when seen up clos, they looked considerably more pixelated than they do in ARR. Ground textures appeared of low quality in many locations also.

Animation quality is also more diverse in ARR. Performing an ability in the original simply showed your character performing a quick squat animation, for example. Weapon animation skills in the original we're more elaborate and took considerably longer to perform. Movement animation was also more complex, especially when changing directions. But it made control feel sluggish do to the time it took for these animations to complete. You'd never be able to do battles like Titan with the kind of input response that 1.0 had.

For reference I am using this video of the last battle and the Garuda battle in the original. Notice how the texture quality looks poor when Garuda's hooves touch down on the rock. I would call that pretty poor.

Ultra high resolution textures supported by D3D 10 and D3D11 are typically used in just a few locations in games that support them. They are not used for every nook and cranny of the game. The game already uses some rather high resolution textures already. Like the starry night sky seen when the weather is clear.


Link to Image.

We're likely going to see a graphical update for higher end machines after the PS4 version launches, at least that's my bet. Wasn't it stated that that would happen by a Dev at some point too? I'm too tired and lazy to look it up myself.

But you know they've been planning on updating the graphics for quite some time. They aren't going to be staying on DX9 forever.

Originally Posted by 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.

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.

Originally Posted by CrAZYVIC

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.