How To Make Ffxi Look HD

My native resolution is 1600 x 900 btw. Also have a 6870 radeon HD card
Click for bigger picture :3... also yes anti-alias makes a difference silly persons~

no, it's not going to make the model textures look any better, but it gives a smooth edge to everything and areas look a lot more stunning!

Before Resolution 2x and anti-alias:



After resolution 2x and anti-alias:

it does look rly good Emirii, even with double resolution almost no noticeable, anyone that plays ffxi "windowed" and puts a resolution higher than 1080p (1920x 1080) it won't do good, you wont really notice any graphics difference at all , it will affect game performance by lot, or... unless you are playing in full screen in a 50 inch monitor.. there is no need to set it more higher than that, it's just an exaggeration. the game haves a cap limit of 30 frames

So wait you see my muscles in full detail in my Ravager's D:

Icame

The difference is there, but you have to look really hard to find it <.<

I honestly don't see a difference between AA and no AA, sorry. :\

In my opinion, the biggest difference maker outside of doubling your resolution would be fixing all of the godawful blurry and low res textures, like carpets in the MH and that tile that your character is standing on in that Ru'Lude PLD screenshot. Wish someone would go and do something like that, but everyone is as lazy as I am! T~T

you lose the sky textures :(

THIRD PARTY TOOLS

GM

I agree for that tile, though it doesnt look to bad.Kinda put wrong SS the character seemed closer for me ;_; oh well I will take another one soon.

Just used the double thingy.Always did 1.0, I have a old PC and I though higher would make it explode.Work well, a bit laggy when there is alot of action around tho =( I need a new PC, I am so lazy and so not nerd.Shopping PCs give me a HUGE headache ;_;

;O noooooo ;_; Got tired to see that *** tail after 4 years =(

could've always recreated yourself entirely



BUT NOOOOOOOO, YOU'VE GOT TO GO AND CHEAT

That was just the sky weather changing.

You don't lose anything in the "fake" super sampling/AA in FFXI. Asides from maybe Frames Per Second if your PC is from 2002 or older.

If you can manage a 2x background ratio what you can get is no stair casing on polygon edges. The ideal resolution would be something like 1024x1024 with a 2048x2048 background or 1280x720 with a 2048x2048 background. Obviously I take what "super sampling" I can get with playing at 1920x1080 with a 2048x2048 background resolution. It still helps but mostly only affects where pixels touch on the vertical adjacent pixels. Unfortunatly XI's rendering engine doesn't support higher resolution than 2048x2048 or else I'd be playing in 1920x1080 with a 3840x2160 background resolution.

These images are a bad example because they're scaled down and both actually have a super sampling effect though the second images might be stronger. The best comparison would need to be at actual un-altered screen shot resolution with a screenshot taking at the near same time with the background resolution increased then with zooms to similar areas where the super sampling can be seen.

I kinda like the result, for a very old pc it looks not bad.Still a bit "bleurry but alot better then it used to look.

If you're further interested in upgrading your visual experience with XI there are a number of DAT modifications and even some for high quality zone replacement. (Though mostly mog house to that end.)

I maintain a .DAT modification pack for both the Graphic User Interface (GUI) and the in game maps. Both can be found on the Windower forums in the DAT section and also info is here.

This would be a better comparison imo.

Click for full size.

hume are prettier for me, mithra are ugly, not my taste for using a female character

Subligars and Harnesses are the best way to make ffxi look HG.

I honestly cant stand my mithra anymore and I regret not taking a hume, oh well.I can see myself as hume at least!

I'm pretty sure it's a memory issue... same thing happens to me when running two characters on the same screen.

I notice if I start scrolling up the chatlog, I start seeing things in my mule's chatlog that should only be in my main character's chatlog... once that happens, if I escape out of the chatlog, I'm usually fine. If I continue scrolling, then the window freezes.

On the subject of graphics - does anyone experience any of the following, or similar issues?

- The Bastok Flags near the exits to Gustaberg flickering.
- Equipment textures occasionally flickering, especially when overlapped by other equipment or hair.
- When drawdistance is set high, stuff on the horizon disappears as you get CLOSER, then eventually reappears as you get even closer... (I've had this happen in Valkurm)
- When drawdistance is set low or to default, you can see random parts of terrain way off in the distance, like the entrance to a tunnel, but not the terrain around it. (I notice this a lot in Valkurm)...
- Rotating the camera slightly can cause objects to disappear from your screen. An example of this... flowers on a hill in the Highlands... a slight camera rotation makes them vanish.
- Monsters disappearing from sight if they walk behind an object that should not obstruct them from view... I noticed a Tonberry Tracker would disappear briefly if he was at a certain angle behind a barred door.. the door is see-thru, and the bars are quite small...

Holy ***.
In a real FFXI scenario, that would be very hard to notice. >_>

Read it a few pages back, how would I go about turning up the mip mapping?

i.e. whats a solid boosted setting I could use?

edit: I was being hasty, but read further and saw the mip mapping = 4 was extreme. Anyone know of a safe cap number though?

It makes quite a big difference actually in my own opinion. Anti Aliasing is usually scene as a pretty big quality boost in most games across the board. FSAA plays an even larger role in actual gameplay where instead of seeing the edges of walls/corners/polys staircase sharply, they look more normal and smooth. I can't stand playing games with out it. If it doesn't bother you, consider that a good thing!


Many of these are problems with XI's rendering engine and PC support especially with newer graphics cards.

"- Monsters disappearing from sight if they walk behind an object that should not obstruct them from view... I noticed a Tonberry Tracker would disappear briefly if he was at a certain angle behind a barred door.. the door is see-thru, and the bars are quite small..."

This is a Windower performance feature. It hides models when it believes they are obscured to your view instead of drawing them at all times. I believe there is no way to disable this.

"- Rotating the camera slightly can cause objects to disappear from your screen. An example of this... flowers on a hill in the Highlands... a slight camera rotation makes them vanish."

This is a known issue. It most likely has something to do with how the game renders assets in that zone. Probably has buggy Position/Camera sensing to load out to save resources.

"- When drawdistance is set low or to default, you can see random parts of terrain way off in the distance, like the entrance to a tunnel, but not the terrain around it. (I notice this a lot in Valkurm)..."

More to do with how the rendering engine handles some chunks of areas. Probably missing the flag that would tell it to vanish at x distance.

"- When drawdistance is set high, stuff on the horizon disappears as you get CLOSER, then eventually reappears as you get even closer... (I've had this happen in Valkurm)"

Again this is just how the zones were setup to be rendered. For example chunks of k. highlands will not be visible no matter how high you turn your draw distance up until you walk to a certain point. There is likely a load/unload flag in the zone that has it load something infront of you and then stop rendering something behind you. This is very visible in many zones if you turn on wireframe and say you're in a dungeon and go throw a twisty corridor or hallway. Half way through the hall way, the area behind you will be unloaded from memory [actually it's probably still there but it's told to stop rendering it to save resources] and a new chunk in front of you is told to now be displayed instead.

"- Equipment textures occasionally flickering, especially when overlapped by other equipment or hair."

Mostly seems to be a problem with Medium to High End cards from 2006+. Something to do with newer Direct X and the hardware/software emulation of XI and it's engine (and horrible console port coding.) These pieces can be fixed on a case by case scenario by altering the .DATs to push parts of the model far enough apart so they render without meshing/flickering.

"- The Bastok Flags near the exits to Gustaberg flickering."

Same as above.

I'm using 5 at the moment. Remember it's important to set your Antisotripic Filtering to FORCED ON for every game in either CCC or nVidia Contral Panel and at least 8x or 16x setting.

Not entirely concerned about the equipment, since I don't seem to have any issues with mine at least... however, is there a .dat mod out there somewhere for the Bastok Flags and/or the parts of the AH that go wonky?

I don't know why people think this still... it's like people still think that divine seal raise recovers more exp.

What do you want me to say? That it DOES use most of your GPU but it's poorly programmed and relies on your CPU for most of the floating point (75% of the game) math and is rendered in a horrible software emulation layer on the CPU?

I mean sh*t, I can get 120fps on Crysis 1 all setting maxed but still only get f*cking 15fps in Port Jeuno unless I turn the shadows and weather off.

They both play a part but most of the time it's your CPU (and XI's poor programming) that result in the bottleneck.

I've had maybe 8 PC builds with XI installed and always, always have I received higher FPS gain by upgrading CPU over GPU. Unless maybe your GPU is onboard or is an entry level/non gaming model (in which, it WOULD be your bottleneck in this case.) most of my personal experiences point towards XI utilizing your CPU more than your GPU.

Hell, look at the latest fiasco with nVidia. Their last two latest series of cards wouldn't even run XI at above 3-5 fps for what... a year and a half it took to get resolved with a driver update? If I recally correctly the problem was because newer cards are starting to disable legacy features for games this old because they cause newer games to be slower. (An example would be starting with the Geforce 6xxx series 6bit textures weren't supported anymore, resulted in the PC versions of FF7 and FF8 if ran in hardware mode, to look awful. Unfortunately software mode had no texture filtering or graphics options and looked much worse but was all that was available until third party tools arrived.)

As for the looking up your chat log history in FFXi while multiple instances are running, this always causes me to crash. Its a bug with windower and has been that way for a while (for me atleast). Annoying, but you can just run parser to look up past logs and timestamps.

Actually, the belief back in the day was exactly that. People thought that all you'd need was a beefy CPU and onboard video is more than enough to play FFXI with 30fps everywhere. The windower forums was riddled with that garbage propaganda.

Which, as you said, was not true. Hence why I said that it's not true that the game barely uses your GPU. Although the polar opposite (the game uses a lot of your GPU, etc.) is also not true.

It probably stemmed from someone buying a new high end video card and expecting to see 30fps everywhere but got disappointed.

The only real noticeable difference with newer video cards is the ability to play more instances of ffxi simultaneously.