Resolution Fix - Do You Need It?Follow

My new baby has a 17" widescreen on it and I was having difficulty getting resolution clean enough to not annoy me. With the new graphics card, I have the ability to play at some ridiculous resolutions, however the game has some issues with higher res settings. I found this info online and I cannot take credit for it, but it may help other people looking to get that crisp clear picture they always new they could get. I will not post the site, as other items on it were questionable at best...the changes are basic and really only allow the game to accept parameters that the developers probably thought know one would ever use. Here we go........


TWEAK FFXI
Go to start, run and type in regedit. Then go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE,
SOFTWARE > PlayOnlineUS > SquareEnix > FinalFantasyXI if you're
under Windows XP. I do not know if this is the same if you are running Windows
2000.

What are we going to do? Enhance FFXI ofcourse. I've known about these tweaks
for quite a long time and I thought I tell the ppl that don't know
about it. If you don't like editing the registry then oh well my brotha, you are going to
do it today. It's not that hard.

Here is what each thing means

0000 = Mip-map setting. To turn them on enter 1. To turn it off, enter 0. The
screenshot shown will be fixed soon to reflect that.

0001= Is what your current X resolution is. Don't act like you don't know. It's what
resolution you play FFXI at. I'm just getting technical >,>

0002 = IS what your current Y resolution is.

0003 = This is what your current X Background resolution is..or the width >,>

0004 = This is what your current Y Background resolution is...or the height >,>

0007 = I have no idea what this does yet. I'm guessing if I set it to 0, I disbled
something

0011 = I have no idea what this does yet. It's set on 2, so I dunno what happens
when I switch to 1 or 0

0017-0028 = I have no idea. I'm guessing if you change the values, go look at FFXI
config and see if anything has changed.

0029 = This is the number of sounds you can hear at one time. I will explain about
this later.

0030 = No idea. I'm not going to try and set it to 1 >,>

0031 = Don't even dare to mess with this setting! I have no idea what it does, but
do you see those numbers? I imagine if I changed it, FFXI
would crash on the spot >,>

bfirst = WTF is this?

padmode000 = I use a controller >,>

padsin000 = I use a controller >,>

Now what to do?

0003-0004
Ok, I have no idea what resolution you play FFXI at (Values 0001-0002) but what
you want to do is match 0003-0004 with 0001-0002 for
maximum performance and quality. I imagine if you run at a higher resoultion like
myself, these values are prolly 1024*768. Yes increasing it
means more pressure/video ram on your graphics card. But if you have a decent
card, you won't notice a performance hit.

Now I've seen these posts on how if you increase it even further, it looks a ton
better. Let me tell you the truth about this. IT DOES NOT
ENHANCE IT ALL! Setting it to a high value of 2048*2048 will not have those hi rez
models you're looking for in the character creation screen.
I've seen the SS's, I've done it myself, and I see no difference in what my character
looks like. The other big problem with this is that your
graphics is basically ******* You set it at such a high setting, I imagine you're
getting 1-10 FPS XD haha. Do yourself a favor and match this with
your current resolution. I guarantee you will see 0 changes if you increase it even
more.

1024*768 users can get a performance increase w/o losing the quality. Decrease
the Y value to 768. You lose 0 quality and gain some extra
FPS. This is what I used to do when I was on 1024* 768 resolution.

0029

If you go into FFXI config, there is a sound section. This section contains the
maximum number of sounds that can be heard simultaneously. The
minimum is 12 and maximum is 20. Well what if you want to have more?

Before you edit this setting, please find out what sound card you are using.
Onboard sound users will notice a hit in performance if you increase
the setting beyond 20. This is b/c the audio is handled by your motherboard and
CPU. Now lets say you have a Audigy 2, which I currently own.
The Audigy 2 has a maximum hardware streams of 64 so if you own a Audigy 2,
set it to what I currently have. Audigy 1 users have a maximum
hardware stream of 32 so set it to that. If you have a Nforce mobo and have Nforce
audio, you can increase it a bit more w/o having a huge
performance hit like the regular onboard sound.

Do you hear a difference? I will tell you my personal experience. I've done it at 20
for quite a few days/weeks and then 64. I DO NOTICE the
difference in sounds. More sounds are being heard and things sound so much
better. But everyone ears are different. One person may say its a
totally new world and others will say its the same damn thing. Face it people,
everyones ears and eyes are different, they aren't yours, we all
hear and see things differently than you.

Enhance FFXI more - By going in FFXI config

General Section
Mip mapping - Turn it on

Texture Section
Texture compression - If you have a 128 MB graphics card, set it to
uncompressed. If you have something lower than 128, you're going to have
to mess with the low and high settings

On screen maps - Uncompressed if 128MB. Compressed if lower

Effects section
Bump mapping - Turn it on. Some see a performance increase and no loss in
quality by turning it off tho. But if things act up if you turn it off, just
leave it on.

Enviromental animation - Turn it on the setting "Smooth"

Sound section

SoundEffectNum - Do NOT change this setting if you set it to 64 already in the
registery. If you wanna play it safe then set it to the max of 16.

Meh thats bout it. That's the MOST you're going to get out of FFXI. You can't do ****
until they update the graphics engine. Do I run at the best
quality settings? Yes I do, I have a Radeon 9600XT and I set everything to max and
I have no problems even running at 1280*1024 rez unless its
a severe amount of trains or a ton of ppl at dynamis. Hope you enjoyed the tutorial.
If you had any problems, leave comment >.>. I'll prolly
update it another time b/c I know I prolly fudged up somewhere or maybe find out
what those unknown values do.


NOTE - I only used this info to increase my background resolution settings to match the higher resolution game settings to improve the quality. I didnt mess with the sound or anything else. ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS be careful when editing the registry. Make a back up prior just in case.

#1 0000 can take a range from 0-5+ to determine the level of mipmapping results vary based on PC config.

#2 0003-0004 should be set HIGHER than your current resolution. If they are set to the same or lower you will not see much difference. This is because of the nature of the way that FFXI renders it's scenes. You may not think it looks better but it is smoothing the lines more and more.



Anyone looking for a more detailed/accurate version of the registry tweaks can look here:

http://ffxi.allakhazam.com/forum.html?forum=10&mid=1089735902216382834&num=3

What card are you running?

I have a 9800pro, I wouldn't mind messing with these settings as I too just got a 17" widescreen. If you don't mind, could you post what you modified it to give me something to start with? Or you can PM me if you don't want to post it ^^

Well my monitor only goes up to 1280 x 768 resolution. I set that as the game resolution, then set the background resolution to 1440 x 1440 using the registry edits and my goodness, it makes quite a difference. Everything was incredibly crisp, I'm quite glad I tried it.

I'm going to try the MIP map settings and sound settings tonight, but I don't know that I can make a big difference with sound as I'm using the onboard sound.

I was reading that other thread and I'm really curious to try MIP Mapping at 4, he said you can turn down your texture filtering to get a performance boost and still have great looks.

Also to anyone out there who uses them, the newest version of the nvidia drivers fixes the display issue in FFXI where people would randomly dissapear off the screen.