FFXI Finally In High Quality Graphics

Yeah it's really really easy to overload your system with this if you have it set too high. I'm thinking about finding a way to have two or more configs, one for the main character with the pretty graphics and another for the alt characters with no pretty graphics.

Could you just change settings before launching 2nd windower or would this not work?

Yes that works but I'm looking for a more elegant method.

how do you de-activate dgvoodoo btw?

After the game has loaded? You can't because it's already initialized the libraries.

If you mean before, click on the "Disable and Passthru".

How did you guys get that bbq graphics? I don't notice anything different

This is amazing. I'm getting consistent FPS now regardless of 60 or 30 (I usually prefer 30 for multiboxing). Things definitely look crisper and shinier.

Anyone else experiencing lag with any Fire effects now? All fire spells seem to cause a bit of lag for me using this. :< I'm assuming it doesn't like something with the particle effects.

Actually, I still wonder how everyone talks about how this mod should improve the graphics ... I got the Steam version and don't think this should make any difference, however, I got max settings in the configs and I used 4k backround graphics and the game looks very nice. Maybe some of you don't know this, but you can actually enhance the graphics pretty well by doing this:
1. Open "SquareEnix\FINAL FANTASY XI\ToolsEU\FINAL FANTASY XI Config.exe" (or probably Tools[YOURCOUNTRY], depending on where you live, it's best to try out all folders like this because the settings aren't shared). There you can improve the graphics greatly.
2. Use this link (https://www.bg-wiki.com/bg/Graphics) to improve the graphics even further. Regarding the backround resolution, the maximum I've managed to do was F00 x 870 (= 3840 x 2160). But this gives you the effect of 4x Anti-Aliasing still. The game looks great with all this, so I never felt a need to further imrpove this with dgVoodoo.

But you all probably now this anyways xD.

Logically I don't think this mod should improve user experience unless you were using Optimus drivers, which deny Dx8 applications access to the graphics card.

That said, I experienced some modest improvements without Optimus drivers. I don't know whether this reflects improvements in dgvoodoo's shim or what and I am not sure it offsets potential stability issues introduced by dgvoodoo, but it did make dualbox omen on my laptop a little easier.

Windower does this automatically with an option for SuperSampling and we've been doing that for years.


I've experienced a boost in stability which confirms something I've been suspicious about for a long time, the DX8->DX9-WDM pipeline in the newer versions of Windows and nVidia drivers is ***. I no longer get "nVidia driver crashed" errors and the game doesn't crash on a screen change. Neither Microsoft nor hardware venders give two shits about FFXI or older retro gaming, so this would be understandable and the reason why dgVoodoo exists in the first place.


And that brings me to my point. Guys this is't a HD remake, you are using the exact same textures, exact same models, exact same zones, animations and other resources. It's going to be rasterized exactly like it was before. What this enables is special antialiasing effects that modern graphics cards have along with better lighting and special effects. Now if you are tri or quad boxing at 1024x768 with all special effects disabled then you won't notice a damn thing happening. If you are playing at high resolution with all the shinies turned on, then it's extremely noticeable. Look at the aura effect from Meditate and the sparkly particle effects off Hasso for examples. Warcry has a nice full effect where before it was very flat. Several of he WS's look very good, CDC turns into a light show and Atonement is just wow.

Since I have hardly ever touched optimization features in games, what would be the option to turn off or down if I am experiencing mass CPU usage (jumps from 11-15% to 70%) when in town near small amount of PCs? The only option I recall touching was the vram.

To clarify, no it never used that much CPU before voodoo. Thanks.

Turn shadows to normal, this game handles shadows poorly.

In Windower enable SuperSampling and borderless window set to a resolution that match's your screen.

In FFXI Config make sure everything is set to uncompressed and bump mapping turned on along with environmental animations.

Inside FFXI check your effects filters, have it set to where you can see your own animations and the parties animations.

Inside dgVoodoo2 make sure Antialiasing is set to App-Controlled (for now), Watermark on (for testing purposes) and Texture Filtering to 16x AA (8x is ok if your GPU is weaker).

Then you have your graphics card options and that's a whole other can of worms.

I have always had everything off in FFXI (no shadows, no weather animations, etc.). The minimum. I did this because of multi-boxing and to hopefully minimize tdr crashes. So, it has to be dgVoodoo that is causing this spike in town. It doesn't happen anywhere else.

Also, I have app-controlled on and texture filters 8x. So, all that is already set. I guess my question is can I keep my graphics the same as I had them before and just use dgVoodoo to prevent the tdr crashes (because it works GREAT). But I may be showing my ignorance to how voodoo works and my request is impossible. I notice it makes my characters darker and I assume this has to do with newer lighting effects.

to gain the benefits of not crashing, you have to at least upgrade the calls to dx11

doing this should offload processing to the GPU, decreasing CPU load, not the other way around

so no, there's no way to get the exact results you'd have without it while still preventing crashes, but high CPU usage is unexpected and may still be something you can resolve by tweaking

texture filtering should be app driven if you dont care for any graphical improvements

how many instances are you running? how much vram did you give each? which graphics card are you using?

4 instances. I set the call pathway(pol) to 1024MB so I assume they are all getting 1024MB. 2GB GTX 770.

Under 'DirectX' tab I have dgVoodoo virtual accelerated 3D card chosen if that matters. Mine wasn't an option.

you're probably choking out your graphics card by using all of it's VRAM, that's much too high..

graphics card is probably constantly paging, resulting in increased cpu load to handle all of the paging

turn it down to 256 tops, if using 4 chars on that gpu

And there is your problem...

Four instances with 1024MB set and 2GB of graphics memory. Whenever there would be a ton of resources loaded, like in town, it's going to choke hard.

This is how graphics memory works inside Windows. You have two pools of memory, first is local memory the other is reserve system memory. When an application initialized it starts filling up memory with stuff and rarely directly deallocates stuff it's not using, eventually when that memory fills up the GPU drivers will start garbage collection and either dump that stuff out or move it to reserve system memory. Now practically no modern game will ever use reserve system memory because they realize when their running out of local memory and just dump their own resources. Reserve system memory is something created during the AGP days and used so that graphics programs wouldn't crash out if they ran out of memory, this was when GPU's had like 16~32MB of memory so it was still a tightly managed resource.

Now dgVoodoo needs to know what ceiling to set for allocating graphics memory so it reports that value to the title as available local graphics memory. Four instances of FFXI each thinking they have 1024MB of graphics memory available and therefor not bothering to remove graphical resources or manage it in any way, dgVodoo won't do that either, so now your 2GB graphics card is having to handle memory far in excess of what it's built with and the drivers are moving stuff to reserve system memory and possible even hard disk swap.

So yeah reduce your per-process memory to 256MB, your not using shiny graphics and no need for a high memory ceiling just to hold data that you won't use.

Hmm another note that people might not get. This isn't just a translation from DX8 to DX11, that's impossible to do directly and many functions don't map like that. Instead this is using HLSL to do dynamic translations from DX8 commands into an equivalent in DX11. So hundreds of small shaders are being used for this, which is great because modern cards have a ***ton of compute resources to run these shaders. Each shader takes up some memory, both in loading the shader and providing the shader a working space to do it's job on the pixel data it's being fed. This enables some pretty great stuff but comes at the cost of using more graphics memory then native calls. People don't notice this because how many people run multiple instances of CoD, Battlefield, FFXIV, WoW, or other Shader enabled game? But if your playing FFXI, multi-boxing on an older or lower end card, you are going to need to be very careful about assigned graphics memory.

Lol, all is working fine except now I dont see any character

Then you failed to follow instructions and downloaded the wrong version of dgVoodoo2. Read the first page as it plainly has a link and directions.

This is working great for me. It actually fixed the problem I was having with my integrated video card playing the game instead of my secondary card because of the direct x 8 bs. So I no longer have to use an external monitor to fix the issue. Now its just because it's big n' beautiful. lol.

Would it be possible that I would need to lower it below 256MB? Sitting idly in Reisenjima (not many characters around) it idles at 50% CPU usage (normally 30% before voodoo). When near Quetz my computer sounds like its about to take off down an airport runway and jumps to 90% usage! Last time I did Quetz during campaign it was slow but never 90%. Should I lower it to 128?

In task manager each process is at 600k KB.

Edit: Unsure if this adds to my post but when at 90% usage my actions are not delayed and I do not notice much response delay. It's just really load obviously. Don't want to harm my PC even if event is only a day because this issue could happen in other congested areas without my current knowledge.

Any tips for ReShade? I try to get through the tutorial, however getting to the part where it tells me to select a Preset I am unable to do anything. The [+] button does nothing and the dropdown is blank.

I don't seem to have a visible mouse anymore.(It still exists. It's just entirely invisible when in XI) Any idea wtf would cause that?

The dgvoodoo post explains why it happens, but the short is that there's no fix and not likely to be one.

Ashita has a plugin which will force render your generic mouse over ffxi so you can see where it is, but it won't change states.

I'm having this weird issue where I'm tinkering with the settings in the dgvoodoo control panel, but I can't actually apply them. If I'm just missing a super obvious part of the tutorial, feel free to call me an idiot, but I just can't get these changes to apply.


EDIT: Nevermind, "Run as Admin" was the solution.

Dgvoodoo has been working great and the game looks beautiful while also maintaining 60fps even in crowded areas. Has anyone else noticed a major slowdown in FPS for 1-2 seconds when things like bard song buffs or AoE like Firaga are going on? It may just be due to having anisotropic filtering or anti aliasing maxed out, so I'll have mess around with lowering those settings, but would love to find a way to not drop framerates from bard songs, etc. setting to run at 30fps.