FFXI Finally In High Quality Graphics

OMG ! so beautiful :) thanks guys

Do you need to do that everytime you open the game and want to play? If so, if you multibox you would then need to do it again for each instance?

Darkside, yes but keep in mind this method is only for laptops on windows 10. Desktops are fine where you don't need to do that.

Nobody should have to use pashthrough, the POL client doesn't call d3d8.dll at all and instead calls the usual DDraw.dll, which you shouldn't copy over. If someone has went through the configuration and it's not showing the watermark, then ffximain.dll isn't calling the folder the put d3d8.dll into. FFXI and Windower require two different setups.

Windower required the d3d8.dll to be placed inside the PlayOnline\SquareEnix\PlayOnlineViewer folder. FFXI without Windower (and possibly Ashita) requires d3d8.dll to be placed in PlayOnline\SquareEnix\FINAL FANTASY XI folder.

What happens if i copy d3d8.dll to both folders? I haven't yet, but somewhere, I've missed something. I'll log in without windower later and see what happens.

And thank you all for all the help. Turns out i should have researched first and picked the AMD chip option instead.

Windower is the problem. I have no idea how to fix that, but it works when I open FFXI without it. My mouse is all screwy but I remember reading a fix for that....just not sure where.

Are you launching windower with admin rights? Also you might need to put the d3d8.dll and it's associated config file inside the same folder is hook.dll.

This all revolved around intercepting the loading of a library from within code. Normally an external library is loaded via an include or load statement (depending on language used).
Psuedo-Code

NewInstance = LoadLibrary(d3d8.dll)

What happens is the program will first look in it's working folder, then in it's library path, then in the system library path until it finds the named library. The working folder is the folder the application started in, most applications assume their working folder is always the one they started in, others read a registry variable to get it. By placing our own d3d8.dll inside the working folder we force the program to load that library instead of getting the one out of C::\Windows\System32.

The ~vast~ majority of failures to load are from the dll not being read from the working folder.

Had the same problem, corrected itself for me by deleting dgVoodoo.conf from the same folder aa dgVoodooCpl.exe

Check your fastcs addon config.

It’s //config FrameRateDivisor 1. And yes it’s case-sensitive.

any one have any issues using this when 6booxing by chance?

I have DG voodoo loading up but when it goes full screen i get a line down the left side that is flashing like an old tape loading screen use to give.

Any ideas on what's causing this line?

System info:

Windows 10 pro

AMD 3700X

Nvidia 2080

16 gb ram

With ATI cards enable mipmapping in FFXI and then in the Radeon settings set mipmapping to overrride application settings and crank it up to the max. FFXI nativly use 2 mipmap levels but in the Radeon drivers you can force it to use 16 levels. Now sure how you do this with Nvida but it's probably similar.

Also surface format optimization in the Radeon settings actually reduces texture quality slightly to make things slightly faster (it changes the colorspace format of textures) so you can tick that off if you want (it will make zero performance different with FFXI)

*Necro bump*

I am trying to return but this laptop (Optimus, yadda yadda) has horrible performance so I thought about trying this, but I noticed dgVoodoo was updated few days ago! (on December 25th, Merry Christmas!).

I have been unable to make it work so far, following the instructions, mainly because there is not D38D.dll, I'm trying renaming some of the DLLs in there but didn't have much time earlier, I hope I can re-try later, but just posting here in case anybody has updated to the latest version of dgVoodoo.

Thanks!

dgVoodoo2_63\MS\x86
D3D8.DLL
D3D9.DLL
D3DImm.dll
DDraw.dll

Just copy the D3D8.DLL over, ignore the x64 directory as that's for the DX9 mode.

Thank you for that, that's when I did but I have the "oh, no, horrible crash" when it goes from POL to FFXI.

I did "RTFM" and actually explored all of the pages of this thread, tl;dr of what I did:

- Ensured D3DCompiler_47 dll was already at the syswow64 directory, it already existed so I didn't touch it.
- Put dgVoodoo.exe plus the D3D8.dll library on PlayOnline directory (not FinalFantasy).
- Executed dgVoodoo as administrator and set the minimum recommended settings as in page 18 of this thread. vRAM was set at 1024 MB.
- Unlocked D3D8 DLL via the right click, it was locked.
- Set NVidia settings on pannel as recommended on page 18.

So far, no luck with the latest version OR with the version from two years ago originally mentioned on this thread so for sure I'm doing something dumb but I am not sure what.

Oh! And just to rule out Windower, I moved the dgVoodoo exe + conf file + DLL to FinalFantasy directory and started FFXI without Windower as a test, same crash so we can rule Windower out.

Windows 10
Laptop Lenovo Legion Y520
Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 with 4 GB of vRAM (Optimus, the other one is Intel HD 630)
24 GB of RAM

Just anecdotically, with regular Windower I get only about 17-20 FPS while in Adoulin so that's pretty much unplayable.

I'll play with the settings for a bit more but if there is something obvious that I'm doing wrong (which most likely there is) please let me know.

Thanks!

Does this happen to be a fresh install of FFXI that you've never booted yet? I upgraded my computer over xmas and had to reinstall windows, and I was getting a crash when switching from POL to FFXI, but it turned out I needed to run the FFXI config program first and save the settings, then it started working for me. If not, I'm not really sure why it would be crashing for you, but I did notice on the first page that there's a "beta" version 3.5 or something that's meant to be more stable for FFXI, which is the one I'm using

Yup! Fresh install of FFXI but I forgot to mention (my bad!) that before Windower and everything I did run FFXI Config and executed vanilla FFXI just to make sure it ran well. After that I just used my old Windower copy with my predefined plugins and settings and it works but so slowly! That's why I'm so interested in getting dgVoodoo to work :).

Anyway, yup! FFXI Config is set with only few tweaks to default settings but vanilla FFXI works well (although still slow, of course, and I wouldn't/won't play this game without Windower :P).

(EDIT: tried that beta too last night, btw, same results no matter what version I use :( ).

Just verified the 2.63 version works with Optimus, it's most likely your drivers or even antivirus. Playonline is just directdraw and when it boots FFXI that is when the D3D8 session gets established, so if it's failing at that point then there is a problem with establishing a session or surface. Normally there should be a faulting error that might give a hint, though Windows 10 is really good at hiding "scary" messages from users.

If all else fails you could also try using Atomos's D3D9 proxy, it's easier to get working then dgVoodoo2 as it only works with FFXI.

https://forums.ashitaxi.com/viewforum.php?f=26

It's purpose is to get FFXI working on newer laptops and won't do much else, which might be all you need anyway.

Sorry to keep this long to come back. So, it was some kind of error from my side. What I did was:

1) Update NVidia driver (maybe this?)
2) Reboot the computer (I hadn't in so long... like a week ago).
3) Further lower settings on FFXI Config
4) Further lower settings on NVidia control panel.
5) Further lower settings on dgVoodoo.

Now it's working but I need to figure out exactly how much can I tune up but... yes! I'm happy.

Thanks for the advises and sorry about the noise!

In DGvoodoo settings, where it says "adapter to enable" would I want to let it say both of them or select the Nvidia card?

Reason I ask is that I can run the game when it is set to "both of them" but when I select my Nvidia card which is what I feel it should be, it crashes going from POL to FFXI.

Hi AsAller, I take it you are using NVIDIA card on a laptop. Please refer to my reply in previous pages for a work around this crash.

Does dgVoodoo even help with FFXI running on desktop pc? I 4boxing and each instance of FFXI uses around 16% of my GPU, so GPU is definitely used already. Would dgVoodoo make it work better or use GPU more efficiently?

100% yes. It makes the game massively more stable. Allows you launch other games fullscreen without crashing. Allows you lock your PC or CTRL+ALT+DEL without FFXI crashing. Fixes/changes how some thing render.

I wouldn't say say it offloads off the CPU though. From eyeballing I'd say it increases CPU usage. So you may need to check how 4-boxing is. I don't know about GPU but it does let stuff looking for Directx9-11 app detect ffxi better.

You also can't just set everything to max in DGVoodoo and expect good performance.

Dgvoodoo helps but don't run reshade if you're getting CPU usage you're not happy with, reshade is huge draw. On my 2700x with a 2080rtx super my clients will sit between 3-6% CPU for my 800x600 windows. My 1650 window my draw 10+.