Make FFXI Great Again

From FFXI Wiki



Introduction

In this guide I am going to go over software that can enhances your FPS especially if you are playing on a new ATI/nVidia powered laptop that won't play DirectX8 or lower on the GPU by default and defaults to it all being rendered on the CPU or nVidia power Tegra GPU in handhelds such as smart phones, the nVidia Shield, tablets and various other products that use the Tegra chip.

I'll give you an intro to what is Super Sampling and how it can be achieved on FFXI to help the game look sharper even on lowish end GPUs.

Software that will redirect the DirectX8 API to use DirectX 10/11. Which allows for a lot of post processing image manipulation a.k.a. will bigly enhance the visual aesthetics of FFXI. Some of it is even just used to make FFXI run better on those newer systems before you start using those new DirectX10/11 shaders you will have access to if you so chioce.

Software that will further enhance the visuals now that you have those DirectX10/11 API to communicate with.

And finally software that can allow you run add-on software on top of FFXI to ease the daily grind but only to a point! Some stuff I just cant talk about here and google will be your friend.

Vanilla

Plain FFXI a.k.a. Vanilla is very CPU bound do being developed for the PS2 first then ported to the PC. You can have a 1080TI and will only see 5%~ GPU usage while you new core I7 will see 90%+ usage on one core. That's right FFXI is so old all it can only utilize one CPU core.

I've been playing since the PS2 in North America about 6 months after the PC NA release. Though I started on the PC while my 5 real life friends started on the PS2. I've always felt FFXI had amazing graphics back then and even into this era though lately they started lacking in the animation department for sure to do only supporting DirectX 8 and its lack of shader editing.

Unfortunately newer AMD/nVidia Laptops and Tegra systems decided that they would have dual graphic cards one being on-board and the other your normal off board GPU but those off board GPUs would only kick in if the game supported DirectX9+ and would kill your FPS even though FFXI isn't GPU intensive. Sadly a game already very CPU intensive not having access to a real GPU for the little bit it did utilize one, made it drop to 10-15 FPS.

Super Sampling

dgVoodoo2

Reshade

Project Mercury

Dat Files(Image/Sound Files)

Others