Graphics

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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!

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

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:

Value	Description
0000	MIP mapping
0001	Screen resolution width (in pixels)
0002	Screen resolution height (in pixels)
0003	Background resolution width (in pixels)
0004	Background resolution height (in pixels)
0007	???
0011	Environmental Animation (0=Off, 1=Normal, 2=Smooth)
0017	Bump Mapping (0=Off, 1=On)
0018	Texture Compression (0=High, 1=Low, 2=Uncompressed)
0019	On-Screen Maps (0=Compressed, 1=Uncompressed)

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-dimensional 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.

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:

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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:

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.

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).