Enabled higher resolution on background textures. Game looks amazing. Look to see how - Page 25 - Final Fantasy XI :: Dreams in Vana'diel :: Community

Joshua · 04-30-2008, 11:00 AM

What do you mean by pushing it until "it's just painful to use"?

So then, assuming background resolution can be raised virtually without limit, why do so many people use 2048x2048? Why not go higher?

Ellipses · 04-30-2008, 11:08 AM

Because a lot of people play at 1024x768, probably, and pushing it higher than double can start to degrade performance, depending on the hardware. Although I don't see where there are any numbers on how many people use 2048x2048. (Incidentally, those values also don't have to match; I've never gotten any better performance out of making it square vs. just doubling resolution in both directions.)

Feba · 04-30-2008, 11:13 AM

I'm not exactly sure what Mhurron is talking about, but he's probably talking about some visual effect caused by trying to squeeze ten pounds of pixels into a one pound screen. there's also the glitches it can cause-- for example, I once turned mine up too high, and it caused the background to be very flickery, and replace parts of it with a chalkboard pattern, because my graphics card couldn't keep up. It was impossible to use.

Originally Posted by Joshua

why do so many people use 2048x2048? Why not go higher?

Diminishing returns, hardware requirements. Turning the resolution up to infinity isn't going to make the game look that much better. It will make your computer run much slower, and again likely cause the problems Mhurron was referring to.

Joshua · 05-01-2008, 03:04 PM

Then, is there any benefit to doubling the background resolution (versus the overlay resolution) on both axes? I mean, is there any reason that the guide I linked to doubled the resolution on both axes, instead of changed the resolution by some other multiplier (triple, quadruple, just some random number, etc.)?

Ellipses · 05-01-2008, 03:20 PM

Doubling the overlay resolution doesn't really make a heck of a lot of sense, since the monitor is not twice as big as itself.

Doubling the background resolution gives you fake anti-aliasing, which is what most people are after when they're doing this. Tripling or quadrupling it would likely slow the game down too much for most people to bother. And doing things in strange multiples (like 1.5x or something) is just weird and doesn't look as good.

As far as doubling the width and then using that value in both dimensions (2048x2048), instead of doubling the width and then doubling the height (2048x1536), I really don't know why people go with the first option. It may be that on certain hardware, that works better. Or it may be that it used to be required on certain hardware, and now it's just how everyone does it, especially since the resolutions you can set through the provided settings app are square. Or maybe they only want to multiply once instead of twice. Personally, I've always gotten better performance out of just doubling each dimension (2048x1536, or, in my case, 2880x1800). YMMV.

Joshua · 05-01-2008, 04:03 PM

When I said "doubling the background resolution (versus the overlay resolution)", I meant "setting the background resolution to be twice the size of the overlay resolution on both axes". You still answered my question, though. And I understand the overlay resolution stuff you mentioned in the beginning of your post, anyway.

Really, I just wanted to know why people double it (instead of just make it larger by some other value), and why people render it square. Now I understand why people double it (looks good without hampering performance too much), and that it's not necessary to make it square, even though people do.

When I get the game, I might just double it...Or set the background resolution to the same as my overlay resolution. I'll play around with it, though.

Thanks, all.

bleuhaze · 07-01-2008, 09:51 AM

The game DOES looks amazing, but honestly I think I would rather have mediocre graphics/lag-free gameplay rather than amazing graphics/super-mega-lag.

Still a cool trick, though.
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One question, I setup the res on mine at 800x600 I think, I'll have to check when I get home, so should I and how do I change the UI resolution?
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Here's a little trick/tip for anyone who wants to improve performance and visuals.

The example below illustrates some possible background resolutions, demonstrating background resolutions of half the screen resolution, matched to screen resolution, and double the screen resolution.

Pay close attention to the edges between two surfaces. For example, between the floor and the wall in the top image. On the undersampled version you get an extremely jagged edge, sort of a staircase effect. On the matched version, you can still see a staircase, but each stair is exactly 1 pixel tall. In the oversampled version, the staircase is much less apparent. This is because the system is taking 4 pixels and merging them into 1, meaning if the top two pixels are the wall, and the bottom 2 pixels are the floor, then it assigns an average between the two for that pixel on the screen.
For users with a widescreen display, the problem of undersampling (and the subsequent loss of quality) is even more pronounced because the FFXI Config utility only allows you to set the background resolution as high as 1024x1024. As a result, widescreen displays are almost always being undersampled along the X-axis (since they display more than 1024 pixels wide). Using the maximum default settings, any display of 1680x1050 or higher is being undersampled on both axis which results in a sometimes considerable loss of quality. In these cases, even setting the background resolution to match your monitor's native resolution can provide a substantial visual improvement. Obviously, oversampling will improve the visuals even further.

Okay, so basically there are 4 registry values that affect this.

0001 Screen resolution width (in pixels)
0002 Screen resolution height (in pixels)
0003 Background resolution width (in pixels)
0004 Background resolution height (in pixels)

So, if you match all 4 of these values to 1024x1280, for example, then the visuals will look like the middle picture. And if you even make the background resolution higher than the screen resolution by 2x, it will be 2x Oversampled, increasing visuals even further!

Hope this helps!