[Rychiar]

I hope the two pics will show the apparent difference.

[Serpent]

Thank you so much man The game looks way better.

[Miriamel]

This is ~1450:

[wrecklass]

Well, after looking at the two pictures I saw what you were talking about. It appears to me that no matter what Resolution you are running FFXI at, the texture and polygon resolutions are only as high as the Background Resolution is set to.

I changed this setting and logged in and could now see the difference. It is much clearer. But, on the theory that the problem is the background resolution needs to match my screen resolution, I went into the Registry and changed to 1600x1600. The game looks just as good as when it is 2048x2048. So I suggest you try doing that and see if you like the results as well. It may help keep the performance up.

At any rate I can say I have seen complete evidence that adjusting this setting can make a big difference. Thanks Rychiar.

[Rychiar]

I just hope everyone gets to see this. Speak the word :spin:

[Azurah]

I edited the registry to change the background res to 1600 x 1600 on my Geforce 4 FX 5200, but my character would not even show up and the game was slow.

I've returned the my old settings and now at the character making screen I get a bright yellow neon background and the sky in game isn't showing up properly. I can take screenshots if needed. I'm just wondering if I damaged the card or if there is a simple way to fix this? I'm going to try reinstalling the drivers for now.

[Azurah]

Nevermind, reinstalling the drivers fixed it. :sweat:

[alpha1471]

Originally posted by mokalikawoo
When you play for hours I don't really care so much about jaggies. Silky smooth frame rate for me any day :D [/b]

Isn't there a way to limit the amount of onscreen activity? That would be a better way to compensate for the higher texture quality. Three or more full and active parties in one area is very taxing even with lower texture resolutions. I would rather ignore those people using filters. Limiting draw distances when you please is a nice feature that doesn't require restarting the game. It is much more practical than restarting the game to change the texture resolution for whatever situation you're in.

As for "silky smooth" frame rates, isn't that a bit superficial? I'm sure you've played games where the frame rates are well above 60 fps, but in FFXI the frame rate is locked at 30 fps. Onscreen activity would lower it, but that's mostly in rare cases when other parties are in your area as well (ie Qufim). It would be more efficient to not draw the characters that don't pertain to your party when there are so many people in the area.

As for my personal preference, I think the game is more enjoyable without the jaggies. Frame rates are locked at 30 fps anyway, so I would like to set the quality such that it closely matches that frame limit without dipping too much from onscreen activity. I use 1024x768 screen resolution with 1280x1280 texture resolution and 8x AF, and I'm very pleased with the balance between quality and performance.

[Vairu]

WOW that is a big difference

i've been playing on my laptop with only 32mb of VRAM so anything over 800x600 & 500x500 is awesome!

I'm thinking of building a box, how does this sound:

Atholon XP 2500+ Barton 333mhz FSB
$90.00
Atholon XP 2500+ Barton

AN35N-Ultra for AMD processors Mobo
$49.99 (after rebate)
Atholon Mobo by Shuttle

512mb PC 3200 400mhz DDR Ram
$88.50
512mb PC3200 400mhz DDR

40gb 7200RPM EIDE Ultra ATA 100 HDD
$62.00
40gb Seagate 7200rpm

Geforce FX5200 128mb DDR 8xAGP
$66.99
Geforce fx5200

52x CD-Rom
$16.99
52x Cdrom

Raidmax Black 10-Bay ATX Mid-Tower Case w/ Front USB 2.0, Model 289WBP(Blue) - Retail
$36.99
Raidmax Blue case

KDS 17" CRT Monitor, Black model XF-7BK - RETAIL Flat screen
$119.00
17" crt flat

Some Keyboard that's good enough to use

Total: 530.46


Summary:
1.8ghz AMD Barton and Mobo to support it
512mb DDR PC 3200 400mhz RAM
40gb HDD
17" Flat screen CRT
Geforce FX 5200 128mb ddr 8x/4x AGP
52x CD-ROM
Cool & Cheap blue case to mod in the future

The reason for some cheap things, case, low space HDD, etc. is because i'm tight on money for now, and i can upgrade those parts later. Most important is the processor, ram, gfx, monitor for now

Please tell me your opinions or if i should change something for something else, cheaper and better or w/e. thanks

[Silvia]

Dont get a Geforce FX 5200, I have one and they SUCK.

I just bought a Radeon 9600 Pro 256mb, which benchmarked at 6 or 7 times faster than the Geforce.

[Rychiar]

Stay away from nvidia... Heh, nah thats just my opinion, but I would def. go with a radeon 9600 pro (or XT). I am running a a 9800 pro 256 MB ultimate edition card, but you wont need that much power for this game.

[wrecklass]

Memory is cheap, go with 1GB of RAM, it is really good in the modern games these days.

[Vairu]

yea, i'm planning on putting 1gb in my laptop for now though, i don't have that much money darn

[krycis]

Originally posted by Vairu
yea, i'm planning on putting 1gb in my laptop for now though, i don't have that much money darn

A Gig in a desktop would be cheaper and more usefull than it would be for a laptop.

[taintedvision]

Originally posted by shader_hacker
All:

Ok, I'm going to explain a few things about the graphics settings in hopes that it would clarify a few things. Since this game was developed in Japan, I believe they have different settings for video boards than we do.

The game seems to be rendered in 2 seperate frame buffers. One rendering target is the overlay text screen where you see the menus, text, etc.. The other one is the rendering buffer. This is where you render to the characters, textures, background buildings, all objects, etc..(i.e. a typical game).

The Screen Resolution is the Overlay resolution of the game. So therefore changing that only changes the size of the text and menus.

The Background Resolution (should be called Game Resolution) is the resolution of the actual game and it's objects (as mentioned before).

North America doesn't support square size resolutions in their rendering cards or monitor resolutions. This is because we use an aspect ratio of 4:3 or 1.33. So our video cards are picking what resolution in the game to use based on the horizontal number. For example, the default in the game was 512x512. The video card would just render the game at 512x384. When you switched to 1024x1024, the video card would choose 1024x768.

This hack is very interesting because it allows the NA people to switch the game resolution to a resolution that won't be trunctated across the vertical scanlines. Therefore instead of going to 2048x2048, which would get truncated, try values of 1280x1024 by switching on the horizontal and leaving the vertical alone. For example, using 500 and 400. I've found that now I can get that resolution (which is my most common res for playing games) and you will see a world of difference.

Hope this clears some things up.

-ShaderHacker

there are always two seperate frame buffers. It's what allows for animation transitions and genrealize translations and rotations of objects. sorry had to point this out.