| This Article is a Community Guide |
|---|
| Guides exist as a community effort to help fellow players navigate the game. Opinions and strategies in their content may vary from editor to editor, but feel free to add new or correct out of date information. Guides are subject to the same editing standards of other FFXIclopedia articles. |
 |
NOTICE: | This article is currently undergoing construction by a single editor or group of editors. Please do not edit or delete this article until this banner is removed or in absence of discussion. |
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