FFXI Finally In High Quality Graphics

Did anyone ever figure out additional reasons that screenshots might fail? I set this up over the weekend and had no real issues other than that. The weird thing is that I'm triboxing and it only seems to be occurring with one account (whether it's the only one running or alongside the other two).
On that one, it'll give the "failed to convert to PNG" error if using that, or with JPG it'll indicate success but the file won't actually be written. So my assumption is that whatever it's grabbing is empty, resulting in zero data to write.

Fast Memory Access isn't on, and settings are identical between all three anyway.

I just wanted to update this. I'm running a Ryzen 1700 + GTX 1080 Ti (obviously not purchased for FFXI) at 4k. Originally I was on Windows 10, because blah blah new processors not supported by Windows 7, etc. Well, I installed 7 anyway and got all the drivers working, and with the same video driver version that I used on 10, everything is flawless at 60fps. YMMV, of course.

Edit: guess I never mentioned my machine was having the same issues, but this fixed both of them

What settings are you guys using for the best looking game?
Like under the DirectX tab or anywhere else? Thank you.

Has anyone tried this who actually had good graphics settings before they tried it?

I'm curious whether this actually improves graphics or not. Nothing I've seen so far suggests it will make your game look any better unless you were running with poor settings beforehand. I'm running 2x supersampling already, and the game looks beautiful without dgVoodoo. It seems like this is less a "FFXI finally in high quality graphics" tool and more a "FFXI finally runs smoothly on hardware it didn't used to" tool.

Has anyone seen an actual graphical improvement from this? If so, can you maybe post a screenshot? If my game already runs smoothly and looks beautiful will I actually gain anything by fussing with this?

I did a before and after in The Boyadha Tree and I can personally say there is a difference in quality. I have a brand new PC as well with a good card.

With Voodoo active, the entire zone was crisper and I could see a lot farther away (draw distance). The catch is if you're dual-boxing then you're screwed since this uses way too many resources. My 2nd instance crawled to a screeching halt and I had to force shut down my game.

For me personally, I'm happy with the way the game looks with my card. If I wasn't multi-boxing then I'd probably use the Voodoo app.

I tri-box and have a shortcut to the program on my toolbar. I disable dgvoodoo for the boxes, but enable it on my main. It looks great and I'm only on my boxes for short periods since I make heavy use of the send addon. So, fear not multi-boxers! But yeah, if you wanted to do it for all of them, it's very heavy on resources.


If you think it looks great, then honestly I'd stick with what works well for you. DGVoodoo isn't going to enhance the background as much as you'd think/want. Its mainly about the 3-d animations during spells, weapon skills, shiny stuff, etc. For me, it helped me take some of the CPU load down, finally applying it to the graphics card. So I got a bonus when it looked crisper and shinier too.

My impression with it so far is that it more or less lets you use in-engine lighting as intended (or more closely to it), which is something that has otherwise not worked correctly in Windower. Given that, Windower defaults do disable it, so you have to toggle it back on or change the init file.

There are things you can do, most importantly you need two windower profiles, one for "Main Character" and another for "Mules". The Main one has SSAA and all the shiny stuff turned on, the mules has everything disabled, including in game filters for animations.

Doing that I've been able to run main at 2560x1440 with SSAA and 16xAF while three mules are 1024x768 with everything disabled. Zero issues, super smooth including during battles. Also I've got memory set to 512MB in dgVoodoo2 so there is plenty to go around, if your multiboxing on a 2GB card then possibly set it to 256MB.


Most certainly without a doubt 100% yes. The problem with screenshots is that in-game shots done with Windower won't be accurate, you need to use an outside tool to catch the image after post-processing. This will not change textures, models or any other FFXI resource, only SE can do that. Instead this changes the graphics calls so that proper lighting, particle effects and post processing are done. All the animations look amazing, sparkly with particles and aura's doing what they are supposed to do. Standing next to light sources finally causes the proper shading to happen. Basically animations and special effects look far better, especially during battle which is now a huge light show.


FFXI already ran super smooth on all my machines and I've been an avid user of dgVoodoo2 for years on older games. The High Definition comment was because players have been begging for an HD update to FFXI's graphics engine and SE developers once said they were looking into it. That never happened and this is the next best thing.

DGVoodoo looks amazing, you'll notice a difference.

I tried reinstalling and the freezes still persisted no matter what settings I used.

Odd thing is the game runs great, it has no slow downs or graphical issues.

For now I'm going to have to go without it on this PC.

What is really weird is my Laptop is crap and does not have any of the issues my main PC is having. I even tried duplicating the settings.

It sucks having POL lock up during a critical moment or fight.

It could be windower/plugin related. But I think I'd rather go without the graphical enhancements vs losing certain GUIs or add ons.

Also during a Kirin Zerg with this thing on, you weren't kidding about a light show.

The amount of lights/animations going off looked amazing.

Oh okay, thanks for the info. I may tinker with this again then if I can make it work with 2 simultaneous instances.

This is pretty much exactly my point and I think we've even talked about this in-game. You can extend draw distance without dgVoodoo. I think most of what you're seeing in terms of the zone being crisper was a result of increasing the background resolution, also something you can do without dgVoodoo. So I think you're attributing things to dgVoodoo that have nothing to do with dgVoodoo.

That said, it does sound like it makes a significant difference on animations which might be worth it. Seems like I might have to look into this after all, thanks for the info everyone.

My drawdistance was always set to 10. Again the difference is that the games native DX8 calls are being translated into DX11 calls via shaders which enables modern GPU's to use their enhancements correctly. DX8 support doesn't exist on modern OS's, instead it's emulated through DX9. No modern GPU is a DX9 card and instead their drivers emulate DX9 interfaces through their DX10/11/12 stack.

All those layers of emulation are done for compatibility not quality and result in most effects being flat. By skipping straight from DX8 to DX11 your bypassing many of those layers. The GPU drivers see a DX11 session and treat the problem like it would treat other modern games, meaning all those nice driver enhancements come into play.

Someone please help me before I lose my mind. I've been trying to get this to work for 2 hours and I just can't seem to do it.

I'm running w10, 7700k CPU and 1070gtx GPU ;
I downloaded the program, unzipped copied the d3d8 into POL ; I then copied the config and put it into POL.
I unblocked d3d8 in POL and in the Original Folder, I made sure the program application wasn't blocked.

I checked my w10 sys64WOW to make sure that 43/47 were there and installed.

I get a crash as I'm trying to load into my Mog House
(I still get it even after turning off my firewall in control panel)

SS's for reference, please help me.... :
http://imgur.com/a/2Jm44

Change your settings back to default. Uncheck vsync chsnge resolution back to default. Would be a start.

Update: I tried setting the settings back to default and it still crashes.

I also tried taking the d3d8 and the config out of my POL folder and loading the game by itself and it still crashes at the moghouse even in the original client and windower. I'm so lost, I'm hoping its just something silly I've overlooked at this point but I'm unsure. =(

make sure you are using the correct version as well. the working one is the WIP version.

I noticed today that my mouse is invisible in game when using Windower. I only noticed because I started using the FFXIDB plugin and when I went to try and drag/drop the minimap it was a royal pain. Is this related to dgVoodoo? Suggested fix? I've tried both "capture mouse" on and off within dgVoodoo settings but it didn't help. Thanks!

It's not a dgVoodoo setting to change for that. It's the Hardware Mouse option in FFXI itself that you need to turn off (just change in your Windower profile). Unfortunately, that leaves you with the original FFXI mouse cursor, which isn't awesome, but it is visible.

Did you try to click the Disable and passthru to real DirectX box under the DirectX tab? If so, the game should load like it normally did without dgVoodoo, at least. Not really sure how to help you make the game work with dgVoodoo though.

I installed this stuff, and it shows the watermark in the corner to show that it's on, but nothing seems to different?

what is this for exactly? i just saw "high-quality graphics" and expected something would change, but nothing seems to different at all

I feel that the title is somewhat misleading - unless you're running on a laptop that's performance constrained by Optimus drivers or whatever, you're unlikely to see much of a difference, if any. There's no reason that just mapping the DX8 calls to DX11 would really change the rendering of the game.

On the other hand, if you are in a performance-constrained scenario, this does offer the possibility of a significant improvement in that regard.

It also, of course, does let you use additional post-processing shaders and stuff like ReShade, but that's a whole different ball of wax really. If you use driver-level stuff like forced anti-aliasing, that sort of thing might work now as well, when it didn't really before.

Excuse me...

This isn't changing the rendering engine inside FFXI, it's changing the rendering path used by DirectX and your GPU drivers. It's effectively skipping past the DX8 -> DX9 -> DX10/11/12 abstraction layers that exist within Microsoft and nVidia/AMD and directly handing the OS / GPU DX11 code. This woudn't be necessary if Microsoft and GPU manufacturers had maintained full DX8 backwards compatibility in modern OS's, but they haven't. Further more many GPU level features are completely inaccessible to DX8 and MS / nVidia / AMD have zero inclination to add them or apply optimizations for them.

Provided someone doesn't have their FFXI instance configured like a potato (800x600 resolution with no SSAA and 512x512 background), then using dgVoodoo really makes the game shine. I've already had over a dozen people directly confirm to me how much better things look while playing.

Do

/jobemote run

And you should have a small lightshow happen.

If you want to do HD textures / models then your going to need to steal the source code from SE to change their custom engine and then rework their texture assets.

I'll happily retest when I get home this evening, but I tested this on my desktop previously (specifically with /jobemote run, even), and noticed no discernible difference.

This is on Win 10 with a GTX 680, and I am certain that dgVoodoo was working, because I was also able to use Reshade just fine.

With or without Windower, because Windower breaks ReShade horrifically, not sure about Ashita but they both use DirectInput hooks which is what ReShade also tries to use.

If it's vanilla FFXI, what was your resolution and background resolution set to? What other settings were present?

Using Windower at 29.9fps on Windows 7 Ultimate x64

2560 x 1440 with SSAA turned on (5120 x 2880 background resolution). Mipmapping set to middle, vanilla would just be to on. AF is set to 16x but MSAA is disabled due to SSAA being used. dgVoodo is set to use 512MB graphics memory. GPU is dual GTX 980Ti's in a watercooled system, FFXI is only set to use one of the GPU's because it's not very stable using both.

Myself, Dap and several other went out and viewed the different animations and spells just to check and there was a very noticeable difference. Ambient lighting actually works so standing near a light source will have your model shaded with that source.

http://imgur.com/a/yYR9w

Had to use screen grabber to get those as the built in screenshot doesn't capture the enhanced lighting effects. The majority of the change would be in things done dynamically since we're not changing the resources like textures / models / animations. So pay attention to lighting and particle effects, shading and other "glowy" stuff.

FFXI has been bland for so long that most of the people have just gotten into the habit of ignoring special effects entirely, often even turning them off completely.

Using Windower 4.3, not sure what the horrifically broken experience would be like - I was even able to use the ReShade shortcut keys to enable/disable shaders on the fly. Obviously, it's really easy to tell whether it's working when you just use something like a simple grayscale shader.

I'm normally running at 1080p with supersampling enabled in the Windower launcher and a middling mipmapping setting.

I'll definitely give it another try when I get home. I'd be very happy to be proven wrong in this case, but a substantial difference just doesn't jive with what I remember from my test.

The newest version of ReShade3 has a built-in GUI for setting it up and it's that GUI that doesn't work well with Windower. I was able to get ReShade3 working with dgVoodoo2 only in Vanilla FFXI, once I use Windower I can't bring up the ReShade3 GUI and from the log it's registering as not hooking properly.


Well what were you looking for? Screen shots don't work quite right, you can see the aliasing and some pixelation with my imgur uploads but those aren't present when I'm actually playing, likely due to some screen magic the GPU is doing internally.

What I did is that since I have multiple systems next to each other, I had one running dgVodoo2 and the other not and both characters in the same party. Then did animations and watched both screens. The dgVoodoo2 screen was definitely brighter and more dynamic, the non-dgVoodoo2 was typical FFXI flatness that we're used to. Went and killed some Apex using multi-step SC's on WAR and it was extremely pretty.

Did you know CDC fires lazers out in it's animation and that Requiescat looks like the milkyway.

Yeah, ReShade 3 with the GUI is what I used. This overlay, right?

I honestly could not tell you how or why I was able to get it to work correctly, though.


I was just going on basic visual appearance, not screenshots, but didn't do a simultaneous test with two systems. I'll do a proper side-by-side test when I get home.


Yeah, I've long known that the effects aren't rendered quite correctly on PC - there are videos out on youtube of what they looked like on PS2, and it's rather impressive. That's basically what I'd been hoping for out of this tool. Perhaps I just didn't test sufficiently... we'll find out tonight.

Yes that overlay, it fires up fine in Vanilla FFXI but the hot-key won't bind and I have a failed injector message in ReShade's logs. I had ReShade setup to use DX11 via dxgi.dll, might try again later. Where did you put the ReShade files in? The PlayonlineViewer folder or the Final Fantasy XI folder?



With dgVoodoo2 I got the CDC lazers along with all the other pretty effects that are supposed to be there. In fact when we were messing around, Dap was on PLD and did CDC and I exclaimed over Discord "Dude, CDC has lazers", it was the first time any of us had noticed. Did CloudSplitter and it was holy ***impressive, it actually caused another friends game to crash during testing. Turns out their laptop GPU was just too old for this and couldn't handle the effects. You can see all these nice particle animations and lighting effects that were washed out before.

One thing to check is that Windower, by default, forces a fixed ambient light level. There's also, by default, a toggle bound for it on F11...but a lot of Gearswap LUAs will end up binding that to something else, then unbind it when unloaded, etc. So, you may need to toggle it with a console command (or change the init file):

game_forceambientlight 0 (to turn off) or 1 (to turn on, the default)

I think it's possible for it to work without dgVoodoo, but perhaps not consistent across machines? I assume it was made default for a reason. Regardless the resulting fixed light level for players/mobs/other items you can interact with is very usable, but does make the game pretty flat looking. The intended game lighting is a lot more varied.

I'm not 100% sure that the only way to ever see it work is dgVoodoo, since it wasn't something I messed with much prior to that. However, the game does look more dynamic and vibrant using the intended lighting. So, point was more to make sure you turn it on.

Ok checked and I have Bump Mapping turned on and the ambient light effect on by default.

In Nvidia control panel for the pol.exe profile.

Antialiasing - Mode : Application Controlled
Antialiasing - Transparency : 8x
Texture filtering - Quality : Quality (global)
Texture filtering - Trilinear optimization : On

Try testing in Outer or Inner Raz, there is enough background lighting effects to see the difference clearly.