dx11

[Culfinrandir]

The skin texture on our characters and NPCs are also uncompressed now so it looks much better, especially under certain types of light. Alphinaud looks a little less like he has a severe case of herpes as a result.

I thought I was the only one who noticed that Alphinaud originally looked like he had chapped lips and impetigo.

[Raist]

It looks great under DX11 on my laptop, but I'm taking about a 10-15FPS hit pretty much across the board. Seemed like it was bogging down further into the <30 realm at times too (I get 50+ just about anywhere with the DX9 client). IDK... just feels like we are missing some options in the DX11 client that may let us reclaim some frames? Seem to recall we had a lot more tweaking available in the benchmark.

[Freyt]

I noticed Ifrit Egi and Titan Egi look shinier.

Haven't paid attention to anything else.

[Catwho]

Pharos Sirius and Hullbreaker Isle both look breathtaking now. We had to stop and just admire the glittery water in a few places.

[Atoli]

The water, the lighting, the reflections, it all looks so pretty <3
Everything is smoother now, too, although the diffrence is not big in that area.

Something I do not understand is HBAO. With the maximum setting (HBAO+) it looks slightly better than HBAO, but I drop down 40(!), yes, FOURTY fps.
That's just messed up. With HBAO, I have no trouble staying at up to 80 fps unless it's something like S Hunts or the equivalent of HW, but when I switch to HBAO+, the highest I get is 40 fps, which, of course still is enough to play smoothly most contents, especially instanced ones, but I dislike not hitting 60 ._.