DX 11 : D

[Nutz]

The SweetFX example above is probably not what people are hoping for. I don't know that I'd actually say it looks better really. The colors are oversaturated and the contrast is turned up.

Presumably a high resolution texture pack would be possible and not terribly labor intensive. It is incredibly unlikely that SE doesn't already have high resolution textures of every asset in the game (probably double the currently used resolution since you typically only work in exponents of 2) though they're probably .psd files currently that would have to be compressed. I imagine they're hesitant to release higher resolution textures because they feel it would look only marginally better for the player and would be significantly more resource intensive. Quadrupling the texture space on everything would be a massive performance hit, though personally I feel like players should be able to toggle it on or off as they see fit, unless for some reason it would be a massive undertaking for them to do it (for example if they don't have high resolution files for everything already -- some artists work in native resolution, or perhaps their game engine maps textures to polygons in an unconventional manner that wouldn't allow swapping in high resolution textures easily -- FFXI was this way).

EDIT: Also, without seeing a very high resolution image I can't say for certain, but to me it looks like the FFXIV:ARR promo shot people like merely uses improved lighting over what we have currently. I doubt that the textures are any different form what we have, though they could be.