graphical imperfections in ffxi

[Robert]

asus striker extreme 680i
core 2 duo 6600 @ 2.4GHz
nvidia 7950GT
4GB of ddr2 ram
two 150GB raptors

everything turned up to max in settings and registry edited to 1680x1050 (my desktop resolution) and I still get jagged edges on things that are at a slight distance (like 10 with windower plugin, MIP mapping is on). are there things in nvidia control panel I can turn up? using regular drivers, I can list all the available settings if necessary

also, I hear you can set mip mapping above 1 in registry but people that I know do that causes their FPS to spike above 30, and doesn't that cause movement speed similar to fleetool even though small?

my FPS is pretty much capped all the time, the only time it dips is dynamis (down to just above 20) and hnm camps (down to 15 in dragon's aery with 100 people doing random shit)

[Snowknight26]

Changing your mipmapping to 16 only changes texture filtering over distances. Changing the texture resolution to double your current resolution\'s width works as fake anti-aliasing (can be slow).

Listed those two things as I wasn\'t sure which you were after.

[Robert]

nvidia control panel has force antialiasing but unsure what effect it would have, its set to application-controlled atm

[Elesirdur]

Forced antialaising won't do anything for FFXI. You can fake AA by increasing the background resolution over and above your screen resolution.

What you want to force is anisotropic filtering (AF). FFXI's graphics engine only uses bilinear filtering (at best) and the texture filtering range is exceedingly short and very noticeable. Places like Aht Urghan or Jeuno, that use a lot of tiled and repeating textures, look absolutely horrid on a stock PC system. By forcing AF you can make FFXI look far, far better by getting rid of that horrible pixelated texture problem landscape is afflicted with. Try it at 4x and go up from there. The higher the AF rate, the more texture samples the GPU runs through and the better it looks.

Be forewarned, forcing AF does not work on all cards and drivers. Only the most recent (March 27ish) ATi Radeon drivers will allow AF to be forced in FFXI. The nVidia drivers in the past always worked fine for me, but I don't know about their new drivers as I've been using this ATi card for over a year now.

[Robert]

so what do you recommend I set it at? currently 1680x1050

[Elesirdur]

change your background resolution to something like 800 hex values (should be something like 2050 pixels)

using the nVidia control panel change the AF setting from "Application Controlled" (or something like it) and try it at a 4x setting and see how that goes. If performance doesn't suffer too much then you can put it up to 8x or 16x and see what happens. Be aware that forcing high AF and using a high background resolution will make using detailed shadows pretty slow; but you CPUs seem quick enough to handle it.