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

[Bishop81]

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

Firstly, that makes no sense.

Yes, it's slower to read many small files scattered all over the disk then one large file that is properly defragmented. But if we increase the texture res, it would just mean the "many small files scattered all over the disc" becomes "many large files scattered all over the disc".

Secondly, it's highly likely that SE pack textures together - i.e. all the textures that need to be loaded together are in one file.

[silentwindfr]

the point it's the version pc can do it, some people outside (not me sadly) have monster and like said someone before, for now them PC are simply reading a book. why not offer the option? most pc game offer you the option to custom your game experience in function of your pc capacity. however FF14 is not the case.

- multi core? FF14 don't care
- more of 3Gb of rams? FF14 don't care
- DX11 support? FF14 don't care.

it look simple as said like this, but even without big monster, most of the recent pc solded, have multi core, more of 3GB of rams and support DX11, why not offer the option to increase the game experience of the people with this machine? i can understand that they want to deliver a good experience for low end pc, but... maybe it's time to look to the whole pc community and offer a good experience for modern pc. not only pc that was made on the ps3 model.

[Squa11_Leonhart]

Firstly, that makes no sense.

You don't understand how block reads work.

Larger files allow the offset to be cached and mapped removing the need for directory traversal within the package file.

[Bishop81]

You don't understand how block reads work.

Larger files allow the offset to be cached and mapped removing the need for directory traversal within the package file.

And as I mentioned, chances are SE pack related textures together in one big file. Seriously, you think their programmers are that inept?

More data to handle, is more data to handle. It will be slower.

If bigger files are so beneficial, any idiot would just pad out the files with rubbish data to improve performance.

[Sadana]

Let me show you how it's done...

Damn, Shioban, that was above and beyond! Thanks!

[Shioban]

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

The reason for that is the way that FFXIV deal with various sub-sets of textures in-engine, arguable you can compress any texture down using a simple "Low = Lower by a factor of a 1/2" "Medium = Lower by factor of 1/4" etc. etc.

ARR is designed to run on a rough minimum 1024B of System Memory and 512MB of graphics memory for Windows PCs. Obviously this will run quite terribly comapred to a High-End PC, but in terms of texture memory, the game will never really use more than 512-1024 MB of texture memory. Each piece of gear for example in the game has been segmented into 'mapped' sections, to allow specific areas of the model to be compressed more than others.

So something like a robe with a lot of frilly/tiny detail, will retain a higher texture quality than let's say, the belt around that robe. The leather/metal/accesory decals don't need a higher resolution texture and therefore are compressed separately to help reduce the overall load.

Edit: (I may have just necro bumped this a bit, didn't even notice the date my apologies)