FFXI Finally In High Quality Graphics

Is this still true? I have 2 display port monitors and they go to sleep if I don't have the game as main focus and I've not had issues with that. I've not done anything for it.

Computer-initiated sleep is fine. Displayport monitors that adhere to the spec don't send EDID when the monitor itself is powered off, so if you press the button you'll lose that desktop after EDID expires. A few newer monitors may have options to continue sending EDID data when the screen is turned off, but most don't.

HDMI and DVI-D spec pulls 5v power from the computer to power EDID chip so they can continue to tell the computer their resolution even if the monitor is not powered at the time.

I have my PC hooked into a home theater, I believe if I change the source of the AVR it won't crash the game, but turning off the AVR will. (I think my old AVR did not do this-but its been 6-7 years since I had that so I don't recall). dgvoodoo does fix this particular problem. I am currently using display port, I think between my cables, AVR and projector there's a flakey HCDP chip somewhere and I've had better luck with that than HDMI out of the computer. (also this particular computer I've had a litany of EDID and MSI issues, I think it was 3 or 4 things, took me months to figure it all out to work without "issue" (there's still one here and there but its basically random and not daily)

@maletaru I realize my mistake with the image thank you.

Anyways if someone does have recommendations for me to try in dgvoodoo it would be greatly appreciated.

Reminder:

Under DirectX tab, on Texture filtering: Do not set this to app driven, this mangles the system font (if you have them set to high quality fonts).

Do you have a recommendation on what to set it to, instead?

2 seems fine, it only seems to mangle fonts if you have them set to high quality and have app driven in there.

What about the Mipmapping Radial? Thx brotha

I rarely use dgvoodoo that often, but I believe off or app-driven for mipmaps (if you have the plugin)

The problem with dgvoodoo is it can stop screenshots saving (which is why i don't use it much), but it does fix issues like z-fighting (the little shimmer textures on your characters armor or on birds wings etc) among other things.

Those values should be set to "app driven", meaning DgVoodoo2 doesn't explicitly set any of those values and leaves it up to the application or drivers. If "app driven" is giving you issues, then the root cause is likely a global driver setting which acts as a default if nothing else is provided.

I would suggest setting mip mapping to off.

While Saevel is right, mip map at anything but off creates shimmering. Enabling it is also a huge performance hit.

FFXI engine does it's own mipmapping and should be allowed to do so through the windower configuration settings. Trying to use Dgvoodoo2 to override the game engine and have DX11 auto-generate mipmapped textures separately can produce unpredictable results. The same goes for anisotropic texture filtering.

Both should be app driver, with no driver overrides enabled. Dgvoodoo2 will then pass through the FFXI engine settings into DX11 without any modification and things will just work. I have Dgvoodoo2 passing into Reshade with some very nice postprocessing effects.

If you have ingame fonts set to high quality and put tex filtering it to app driven it will apply anti aliasing to the fonts and make them look bad. Set it to anything else and they are fine.

By off I mean mip map off in both XI game settings *and* dgvoodoo.

The in game implementation is bad in terms of looks. The dgvoodoo implementation is bad in terms of looks *and* performance.

Driver settings are separate from either of those.

Try them one at a time and take videos - obvious visual differences.

I have that running right now and it doesn't do that. Your GPU drivers have anisotropic texture filtering set to enhance or override in the general profile. FFXI's engine doesn't handle anisotropic texture filtering very well and it should never be used.

I'll do some testing because I remember "HQ Fonts" being janky and just an attempt to stretch the font texture loaded from the DAT. FFXI's fonts are just regular textures, not an uncommon design pattern from that era.

DgVoodoo2 doesn't "implement" anything like that and instead it just sets flags being sent to the DX11 API during translation. If the game sets the flags then it gets passed along, that is what "app driven" means. FFXI's engine is written at the older DX8 level and that was a very different era then now. The entire reason we use this is because of how poorly modern DX11/12 API's handle the ancient DX8 stuff.

FFXI's original mipmapping implementation is perfectly fine, for DX8 that is. It can't hold a candle to modern algorithms though. FFXI dev team broke it with an update so you kinda have to use the Windower fix to get it working right again.

If you go back one page, you'll see Sechs posted images of the issue. I bumped it cause I'm making some mods that are impacted by this and for whatever reason it seems to help with it.

In theory you are correct. In practice, there is a big performance difference between enabling mip mapping explicitly in dgvoodoo and having it set to either app driven or off with driver settings to enable it globally for dx games.

This may vary between cards and drivers. For me and nvidia drivers, off in game and dgvoodoo with driver settings per preference works best. YMMV.

Anyone here use Lossless Scaling? I have been running DgVoodoo2 but when adding Lossless Scaling it *feels* more crisp. I'm wondering if I even need to run DgVoodoo2 anymore.

When you say "performance difference" what are you meaning? Because for me FFXI runs at several hundred FPS if I don't throttle it to 60FPS. Dgvoodoo2 is meant to assist in playing older games on modern hardware, not all options apply all the time.

Mipmaps are handled a few different ways, from what I can tell dgvoodoo2 is just telling the drivers to automatically generate mipmaps during texture load. Those mipmaps are just down sampled versions of the raw texture and FFXI doesn't use large textures in the first place so the work is miniscule. The older way was for mipmaps to be pre-generated and stored with the texture file, which is fine for smaller textures but gets insane for larger ones. Since FFXI has it's own mipmapping option, it's recommended to use that instead of trying to bypass it and use your GPU's auto-generation method. Mipmap auto-gen in dgvoodoo2 is really for older games that do not natively have mipmapping and instead just stored a single version of a texture in each file.

FFXI already does weird things with textures as it is and Dege had to put in a special handling method to get it working in the first place when I brought it up with him.

This is likely another artifact of FFXI's weird texture management. The fonts themselves are the exact same between normal and high quality, I suspect FFXI is trying to do some sort of native filtering on them and it's doing poorly. Try running the HD fonts without dgvoodoo2 and see if the issue happens? Basically is this a FFXI issue, a Windower issue or a Dgvoodoo / DX11 issue? I can imagine if FFXI is settings a bilinear flag (or similiar) on the font texture and it's being passed along to the DX11 API that turns it into crap, vs overriding that setting with dgvoodoo2.

:Edit:

My brain was tickled because I've seen this before, went back and it's been an issue since 2017 when Dege got Dgvoodoo2 working with FFXI. It has to do with FFXI applying a bilinear filter to the 256x256 font texture from the DAT file. Turn off "HD Fonts", there is absolutely nothing "High Definition" about them, FFXI just loads the same 256x256 texture but flags it to have a bilinear filter to it, which was a common technique back in the DX7/8 days on Win98 / WinXP. DX11 also applies that legacy filter but it ends up looking horrible. What you are doing is having Dgvodooo override that flag and substitute it with it's own, which "fixes" the problem but introduces the issue of filtering every other texture in the game, which can cause unexpected effects cause of how weird FFXI handles textures. The fix we found was just to have FFXI set to normal fonts, since "HD" does nothing for you, and instead use a postprocessor like reshade or do what I do and use your drivers to apply their own better texture filter.

Lossless scaling likely won't work with FFXI natively due to it's DirectX8 engine. All Dgvoodoo2 is doing is translating FFXI's old DX8 API calls into the more modern DX11 API and in doing so bypassing Microsoft's crap legacy DirectX emulation implementation. In theory you could use Atmos's DX9 proxy to translate FFXI's API calls to DX9 which Lossless scaling kinda works with (I think?).

Going from DX8 to DX11 does not automatically increase graphics quality, but it does allow the features of modern frameworks and hardware to mostly work. I heavily use reshade to apply postprocessing filters to FFXI that make the game look really pretty with more vibrant lighting effects. You would be using LLS to do the same thing but with resolution scaling or MFG.

Higher Cpu usage per XI instance. Dgvoodoo does offload to gpu, but not everything is done on the gpu. For me driver settings to enable it have less of a cost, cpu usage wise, than either of the other options.

When you start adding boxes, the cpu usage starts to add up. The uncapped framerste is a result of 100% cpu usage, a thing you don't want. It costs money to constantly run a cpu that high for one.

Sounds like DirectX is useing CPU cycles to generate the downsampled versions of those textures when the textures are loaded, then it shouldn't have to generate it again unless it has to dump the texture and reload the texture. By default DX11 use's the GPU to do this work and only hits the CPU if it fails to do so.

Here is the API being called

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/d3d11/nf-d3d11-id3d11devicecontext-generatemips

Are you on Windows or Linux and what feature level is set?

:Edit:

Again past issue that I've encountered, in this same thread no less.
https://www.ffxiah.com/forum/topic/50992/ffxi-finally-in-high-quality-graphics/24/#3694501

So yeah FFXI's weird texture handling strikes again. The way FFXI handles textures makes it incompatible with the DX11 generatemips shader function, attempting to do that just causes the function to silently fail for every texture with no benefit. Just have it set to "app driven", meaning Dgvoodoo2 won't call that function and instead let FFXI use it's native mipmap implementation.

There are lots of font sheets for XI for different parts of the UI, the config option is only for the one we type with, item descriptions and /yell etc (among some other things).

The lowest one is built into the Xivew file and it is a lossy/compressed dds file (old xiview modifies this one) (1024x2048), medium is the same font sheet but a png so better quality, the high quality one is a 2048x4096 sheet and also a png (sizes are mostly due to all the jp characters).

You really should use high quality fonts.

Ah yeah, that explains it. Imo the XI in game mip maps look like trash, so I never used them.

In fact I had all mip maps to off and anisotropic on and that looked better than any mip map to me. Never noticed an issue with fonts but I used one of Radial's fonts not the in game HQ one.

I have the windower plugin that fixes it back to it's original behavior then have it turned to the top for the most levels created. Dgvoodoo2 is set to "app-driven" for all the options but then I have AFx16 set inside my AMD Radeon control panel to let the GPU do it's thing. I am also applying some nice reshade postprocessing effects, AdaptiveSharpen, AmbientLight, Clarity, FakeHDR, Levels, Vibrance. Windower is setup to use SuperSampling at my 1440p resolution with Bump Mapping off (important). If SSAA was to much then I could use FXAA or SMAA with reshade but I have enough power to do the 1440p resolution doubled.

So I deleted DgVoodoo2 to update my gpu driver (AMD, had the blue character issue, yes that's a thing). Game loads fine. However, when having another game loaded, I cannot alt-tab to said game without FFXI crashing. This has never happened when DgVoodoo was loaded. Only other "mod" I have running is ReShade. If I only have FFXI loaded I can alt-tab just fine to chrome or whatever. But if I alt-tab to another game, instant FFXI crash. Any idea why or how to fix?