[Kailea]

Originally Posted by Armando

There's a difference between your framerate (which is directly tied to your FFXI config options and your computers' hardware and has nothing to do with your connection or ping) and connection lag. Whether your connection to the server is good or bad has no bearing on your framerate (obviously it may spike up very briefly if your connection lags heavily and everything on screen needs to suddenly catch up on their position, but that's besides the point.)

very true, but the fact that FFXI is poorly ported, and the way it runs on a PC, effects the frame rate. I can run any game at near max or max settings (not crysis) and get 45-60 FSP depending on the game, but I try and do that with FFXI... and BAM 20 FPS or lower.

right now, I have about 25-28 FPS when I am doing solo stuff, and when I am in a PT I do about 20-23 or so, and that's with my settings at....

1440-x900
2880x1800
Mip x4
everything uncompressed and set to smooth
forced Vsync, Cat.A.I. set to on, and all the other settings set to default on CCC


my rig should be preforming so much better on FFXI, but since the game was poorly ported and still using DX8.... it does not

[Celeal]

Originally Posted by Kailea

very true, but the fact that FFXI is poorly ported, and the way it runs on a PC, effects the frame rate. I can run any game at near max or max settings (not crysis) and get 45-60 FSP depending on the game, but I try and do that with FFXI... and BAM 20 FPS or lower.

right now, I have about 25-28 FPS when I am doing solo stuff, and when I am in a PT I do about 20-23 or so, and that's with my settings at....

1440-x900
2880x1800
Mip x4
everything uncompressed and set to smooth
forced Vsync, Cat.A.I. set to on, and all the other settings set to default on CCC


my rig should be preforming so much better on FFXI, but since the game was poorly ported and still using DX8.... it does not

From my observation, FFXI's internal image resizing from the frame buffer to the windows client area isn't great. I would rather force the graphics card to do the job instead.

Assuming that you are going to run the window or full screen at 1440x900, I would suggest to set the flame buffer at 1440x900 (instead of 2880x1800), so "virtually" FFXI does not scale the image.

Force your graphics card do the super sampling (anti-aliasing, like using at least 8x) and Anisotropic filtering.

For better fps, disable V-sync unless you see screen tearing.

Although everyone's preference are different, after some tweaking FFXI "looks nice" to me, despite of its lesser fps.

[Raydeus]

Originally Posted by Celeal

Force your graphics card do the super sampling (anti-aliasing, like using at least 8x) and Anisotropic filtering.

How were you able to force AA on XI? I've tried many times in the past and failed miserably.

[Celeal]

Originally Posted by Raydeus

How were you able to force AA on XI? I've tried many times in the past and failed miserably.

When I get home, I may try to post screen shoots...

I don't know, maybe what looks good to me sux for everyone else..

[Mhurron]

Originally Posted by Raydeus

I used to blame DX7 but then Mhurron told me it used DX8, only to change his story later and say it was probably DX6. So who knows.

You know, its not rocket science to figure out. SE is very upfront with the minimum requirements for FFXI.

Graphics Card: NVIDIA® GeForce™ series with 32 MB or ATI® RADEON™ 9000 series
Sound Card: DirectX®8.1 compatible sound card

The important parts are bolded. It requires DirectX 8.1 support. However, the minimum video card is a DirectX 7 card (GeForce 256). Every DirectX release until Vista's release has complete backwards compatibility, both in the new libraries AND shipping the old ones. Now wether SE wrote to the old functions or simply flagged that the game should not use any of the more advanced functions is something that only SE really knows but the fact of how the game runs is that it runs DX 8.1 for sound and requires that level of support, but the video functions use nothing more advanced then DX7, though since it runs just fine in Vista and Windows 7, most likely it is making use of DX8 yet simply indicating it doesn't need to use DX8 introduced functions. The most advanced function that FFXI makes use of is HT&L, and that was introduced with the GeForce 256 and DX7.

DirectX level is not an indicator of how well a game will run, or look.

On top of that, what most people complain of as lag in busy areas isn't really. The game engine is doing this on purpose. It attempts to figure out what is more important to draw right now. Everything else is drawn later, if at all. One of the effects of this is that the graphics engine doesn't really keep track of things that are behind you beyond a certian distance (those things that are unlikely to move into your field of view right now), of course this means that it has to completely drop and redraw everyone when you decide to turn around, or when a bunch of people are blown back, or die or do the things people do that the system isn't expecting. Why does it do this?

Memory: 128 MB RAM

FFXI ( and eve and wow and [insert MMO and many other online games here]) were designed to do this since they know you aren't running a massive supercomputer. The game is very good at not using much since SE is better at writing for consoles then PC's.

Forcing 2x AA has always been just fine for me, I don't usually force AF.

[Armando]

That was fucking informative.

[Kailea]

Originally Posted by Celeal

From my observation, FFXI's internal image resizing from the frame buffer to the windows client area isn't great. I would rather force the graphics card to do the job instead.

Assuming that you are going to run the window or full screen at 1440x900, I would suggest to set the flame buffer at 1440x900 (instead of 2880x1800), so "virtually" FFXI does not scale the image.

Force your graphics card do the super sampling (anti-aliasing, like using at least 8x) and Anisotropic filtering.

For better fps, disable V-sync unless you see screen tearing.

Although everyone's preference are different, after some tweaking FFXI "looks nice" to me, despite of its lesser fps.

never thought of doing it this way, I tried it tonight and it seemed to work better.

AF x4 (edge detect)
AA x4
and game set at 1440x900 (1440x900)

tomorrow I will try....

AF x4 (narrow tent)
AA x2
and game set at 1440x900 (1440x900)