Graphics

Introduction
Final Fantasy XI for the PC has a number of different settings relating to the quality of graphics used in the game. The purpose of this guide is to assist the more adventurous PC users in improving the graphics and/or performance of their PC while playing Final Fantasy XI. This guide assumes the user has a basic understanding of computers. It is not intended as a beginner's guide.

''WARNING: This guide describes using the Windows Registry to make changes to the game's settings which may or may not be possible through the standard FFXI Config tool. Altering the Windows Registry is dangerous, and improper adjustments could prevent FFXI from working or even prevent Windows from functioning altogether. Alter these settings at your own risk and always make backups before making changes!''

Definitions

 * render : This is the process by which a 3-D environment is flattened into a 2-D image to be displayed on your monitor or television.
 * polygon : The 3-D environments in Final Fantasy XI are made up of a large number of simple geometric polygons. It's easy to identify a polygon because its face will always be flat and its edges will always be straight. These polygons are the foundation for Final Fantasy XI's 3-D environment.
 * texture : This term refers to a 2-D image which is applied to the face of a polygon in order to give it the appearance of having a texture rather than a single solid color on a perfectly flat surface. Quite often textures will start out as a very complicated 3-D design, and be rendered out into a 2-D image during the game's design phase in order to save the gaming platform from having to render each and every bump on each and every surface. Instead, a pre-rendered texture is repeated over the surface to create the illusion that the objects being rendered have more detail than they really do.
 * pixel : A pixel is the smallest unit of display on a display device like a monitor or television. Their size can vary depending on your display's size and resolution. The following red dot demonstrates a single pixel on your current display: &#0183;

Registry Overview
All modifications to the settings of the game described in this guide will be done with a program called Regedit. To access this program, click on Start > Run, type "regedit" and click "OK". The configuration for FFXI is stored in the following registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\PlayOnlineUS\SquareEnix\FinalFantasyXI

Before making any changes to the above key, it is recommended that you create a backup. In order to make a backup, select the key and click on "File > Export...". Choose a location to save the ".REG" file and remember where you save it. In the event that you alter the registry in a way that breaks Final Fantasy XI, simply double-click on the ".REG" file to copy the original settings back in.

Please note that all values given in this guide for altering the registry are in decimal (base 10), while the default for the registry is hexadecimal (base 16). When modifying numeric values, please make sure all values you enter are in decimal. If not, any values greater than 9 that you input will be saved incorrectly.

The following is a quick reference for the values found in the above registry key:

Screen Resolution
The screen resolution is defined in values 0001 and 0002 of the registry key. It represents the physical number of pixels displayed on your screen. Value 0001 represents the width of the screen and value 0002 represents the height of the screen. Therefore, when a resolution of "800x600" is referenced, this means 800 pixels wide, 600 pixels tall. If you wish to run your game in 800x600 resolution, you would set value 0001 to "800" and 0002 to "600". As mentioned above, please make sure you enter the values in decimal, not hexadecimal.

This setting is very delicate, and can only be set to a limited number of supported resolutions. It is important that both your video card and your monitor support the screen resolution, or the game will not work. (This does not apply if you use Windower to run in windowed mode, in which case any resolution below that of your current desktop resolution will work. )

The following screen resolutions are generally supported by all monitors and video cards:
 * 640 x 480
 * 800 x 600
 * 1024 x 768
 * 1280 x 1024

Background Resolution
The background resolution is the resolution at which the 3-D graphics in the game are rendered. In almost all cases, this is done at the same resolution as the screen. However, Final Fantasy XI allows us to adjust the two settings separately. This setting has the greatest effect on the overall quality of graphics out of all the settings that you can change.

This setting is not very intuitive to folks who aren't used to thinking the way computers do. When you think of a camera taking a picture, it doesn't matter if the picture is taken from far away and blown up, or from up close and then shrunken down, the image is still clear as long as the object is in focus. This is because the information is stored at a much higher detail than our eyes can perceive, so we can expand and contract the image with minimal visible difference. However, for a computer it's quite a different story, as anyone who has tried the same example with a digital camera could attest. Information is stored only at a pixel level, if you try to expand that pixel to 4 pixels, then you just end up with 4 identical pixels.

Similarly, when this setting is something other than the screen resolution the game's graphics are either undersampled (the smaller image is stretched to fit the larger screen resolution) or oversampled (the larger image is shrunken to fit the smaller screen resolution). This has some interesting side effects.


 * Undersampling : This is the process by which a 3-D image is rendered below the screen's resolution and then expanded to fit the screen. The end result is an image that is poor in quality because the system is only working with the information contained in 1 pixel and trying to span that across multiple pixels. Undersampled images are generally described as "blocky", most noticably at the edges of a polygon.


 * Oversampling : Opposite of undersampling, an image is rendered in higher detail and then shrunken to the smaller screen. The end result is that for each pixel on screen, there is more than one pixel of information to draw from, so the system is able to average the information out and create a much more accurate image. This is very similar to the effect known as anti-aliasing, which does basically the same thing but only for polygon edges. Anti-aliasing is a much more efficient approach since oversampling polygon faces is generally not very beneficial, but unfortunately Final Fantasy XI is not compatible with anti-aliasing.

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.

Another thing to pay attention to is the fact that textures are affected only minimally. This is because the rendering engine is able to access the textures at a much higher level of detail even if the scene is rendered at an undersampled resolution. The textures are pre-rendered with a specific level of detail during the game's development phase, and so changing the background resolution will not drastically alter their appearances.

Note that this setting will not affect the appearance of 2-dimensional artifacts such as the chat log, menus, equipment, and so forth.

MIP Mapping
MIP mapping is a setting that decreases the render quality for textures that are farther away, giving a sort of blur effect. Since the objects are distant, they are likely to appear smaller on the screen and less likely to be the focus of your attention. Therefore, performance can be increased by turning this on at a minimal cost to the quality of the image.

In fact quite often this blurring effect can make the image appear more realistic, as our eyes also tend to have trouble providing great detail about objects farther away (due to the increased amount of air between your eye and the object), while this is not an issue when looking at distant objects on a computer monitor.

The possible settings are:
 * 0 (off) : No MIP mapping. Distant objects will be rendered in full detail.
 * 1 (on) : MIP mapping on. Objects at a certain distance will have less detail, and textures at a certain distance will be slightly more blurry.

Note that you can actually use settings higher than 1 here. This will not change the distance at which objects have less detail, but it will increase the blurring effect of distant textures. The higher the number, the closer the blurring will occur.

The example below illustrates the effect of the MIP map setting on distant objects:

The example below illustrates the effect of the MIP map setting on distant textures:

Environmental Animation
This is a pretty simple setting, and its name pretty much says it all. This determines the framerate at which objects in the environment move, and is defined in the registry value 0011. The possible settings are: This setting will not have a huge impact on gameplay, and turning the setting down will not free up many system resources. For that reason, it is advised to leave this on 2 (smooth).
 * 0 (off) : No animation. The trees and bushes will not sway in the wind, torch flame will not flicker, etc.
 * 1 (normal) : The trees and bushes will sway but their motion will not be smooth. They will move a little, stop, move a little, stop, in very rapid succession, making the movement appear unnatural.
 * 2 (smooth) : The framerate will be increased so that the motion is more natural.

Bump Mapping
Bump mapping is a process by which the textures of an object are given the appearance of 3-D depth. Normally a texture is created with a preset light source in a preset position, so that no matter how you shine light on an object the shadows and highlights of the texture will always be the same. Bump mapping assigns limited 3-D attributes to the texture so that the shadows and highlights can be generated with consideration for the various light sources in the environment. See the figure below for an example: