What is the highest background resolution?Follow

I've been toying around with the registry with some of the well known graphics tweaks. Right now I have my resolution at 1360x768 (Native of my TV) and background resolution at 2048x2048. It looks absolutely stunning, really like a brand new game, and doesn't lag at all. I have an EVGA 8800 GTX so I think if somehow possible it could be pushed farther. What is the highest resolution a video card is able to render? I'd like to make my background resolution even higher to see what happens but I don't know what number to set it to.

OVER 9000!!!!


(_ _) sorry~

Somewhat on the topic, how can I tweak the registry to get 2048x2048?

http://wiki.ffxiclopedia.org/Graphics
Above guide shows how to adjust the graphics beyond what FFXI Config tool allows.

As far as I know... there is no practical limit to the background resolution. Your computer will slow down long before you hit the limit. I'm currently running 1280x1024 screen resolution, 2560x2048 background resolution. So every 4 pixels rendered are combined into 1 pixel on the screen. Looks very nice.

I got 8048x8048 background on my x1900xt by enabling the undocumented texture tiling features in the drivers with ATI tray tool. I can only assume that the 2048x2048 "limit" is imposed by your graphics card and drivers and not by FFXI itself

Anything over 4096x4096 had some serious slowdown problems however. In addition, going from 2x the screen resolution to 4x doesn't really improve things that much (it does slightly, but not enough to make it worth doing). Really all you need is 2x the screen resolution anything beyond that is diminishing returns.

Edited, Apr 12th 2007 6:52pm by Lobivopis

Thanks for posting that information. In particular the FFXIclodpedia article was really good in actually describing how all the settings actually work. I'm definitely going to have to go tinker with my registers again.

Yes, I would also like to know why doubling your native resolution for the background is better, since the default background resolutions everyone can choose and play at without tinkering in the registry are all squares. Also, I thought someone mentioned a maximum supported value of 2048 for the background resolution, what happened with that if people are running up at 2720?

I currently have to settle for the default 1024x1024 right now, and I've never had any problems with it. When I plugged in 2048x2048 as background resolution via the registry, it looked fantastic but I had such low FPS that I had to go back. I'll pick up a new video card and try that out again later. But apparently people are saying I should be doing 2560x2048, double my screen resolution. Why doesn't FFXI set background resolution as a 4:3 ratio by default then? I should be playing with my background resolution at 1280x1024 according to that. I'm just sort of confused why the square-default background resolutions are square, but people are saying to tweak them to double your screen. I thought it was determined you can't tweak background past 2048x2048, so anyone who would like to explain some of this for me, please do, I'm confused.

The only thing I think I can pull from these numbers is somewhere in here people switched from talking about moving the background numbers up to 2048x2048 and started talking about what to set the screen resolution, is this right? That's a lot more understandable to me, if that's what happened. So does that still mean the limit is 2048 unless you're using those new tools to break past it like Lobi?

I guess what I'm trying to say here is: I run on a LCD 4:3 aspect monitor. The native resolution is 1280x1024. Currently, my FFXI screen reso is the same and background is 1024x1024. According to you guys should I change this to:

a)
Screen Res: 1280x1024
Background Res: 2048x2048

b)
Screen Res: 1280x1024
Background Res: 2560x2048

c)
Screen Res: 2560x2048
Background Res: 1024x1024

d)
Screen Res: 2560x2048
Background Res: 2048x2048

e)
Screen Res: 2560x2048
Background Res: 2560x2048

Or any other combination you'd love to provide? Granted, this will happen after my next graphics card upgrade, but I'm curious. I run almost all my games at native, but if oversampling the screen resolution is what you're saying then I may do that, since FFXI caps at 30 FPS anyways.

Sorry about the huge post, thanks for any clearing up you graphics junkies can help with.

Edited for clarity.

Edited, Apr 13th 2007 7:34am by Zekyr

B. In fact this is the exact setting that I use. The reason for this is that when you do 1280x1024 and 2048x2048, you are oversampling by a factor of 1.6 on the horizontal, and 2.0 on the vertical. So what this means is that for every pixel on your screen, the computer has rendered information for 2 pixels tall and 1.6 pixels wide. The 2.0 is easy, it just averages the two pixels out and the color between the two is the color that pixel should be. However, the 1.6 is not so easy because the boundary for the pixels rendered (background) will not line up exactly with the boundaries of the pixels on your screen.

It's sort of a hard concept to grasp, so I'll explain with some diagrams. Take the example of 2048x2048 background. For the far left pixel on the screen, it would look like this:

+---+--+ 
|***|..| 
+---+--+ 
|***|..| 
+---+--+

The pixels with stars are complete pixels, and the pixels with periods are cut off, they are only 60% of a pixel (because your background width is set at a factor of 1.6 of the screen resolution's width), so part of the pixels on the right will influence the screen pixel to the right of this one, which might look like this:

+-+--+-+ 
|.|**|.| 
+-+--+-+ 
|.|**|.| 
+-+--+-+

Now you see in this case, there is the remaining 0.4 pixels worth of information on the left side, then 1.0 pixels in the middle (a full pixel), then 0.2 of the next pixel to the right for a total of 1.6.

In both cases, you will end up giving more weight to the pixels that I've marked with stars, and less weight to the pixels marked with periods. In doing so, you will end up with a less precise image. The advantage to rendering the background at exactly double the screen resolution is that you always have exactly 4 pixels worth of information to draw from in order to determine what the true color of that pixel should be, like so:

+--+--+ 
|..|..| 
+--+--+ 
|..|..| 
+--+--+

To give you a better idea of what this means, consider that the image you are rendering is just a big striped pattern. You have the far left pixels all black, then the next pixels to the right are white, then black, then white, etc. (You may have seen a screen like this while adjusting the settings on your flat-panel monitor. It's handy for revealing how accurate your image is being represented on the screen.) If you look at the image from a distance, it will appear a medium gray, exactly halfway between black and white because your eyes cannot see the level of detail to see the stripes.

In the first example, you will have two complete pixels that are black, and 60% of two pixels which are white. When you average that out, the pixel on the screen will be 62.5% black. Now in the second example, you have 40% of a white pixel column, then 100% of a black pixel column, then 20% of a white pixel column. So again average them out and you'll get 62.5% black. So even though the image you rendered shows 50% of the screen black and 50% white, when it's averaged out to fit your screen you end up with 62.5% black for the two left column of pixels. If you continue down that path of logic, the colors will vary from 37.5% black to 62.5% black. Now take the third example, you have 100% of a black pixel column, then 100% of a white pixel column. Average them out and you get 50% gray. The next pixel over would be the same, 50% gray. So the whole screen will be 50% gray just like if you displayed black/white stripes and moved back and let your eyes do the averaging instead of the computer.

It's a nit-picky thing, and kind of hard to understand. You can do 2048x2048 and it will still look just great I'm sure, but in my opinion 2560x2048 will give you a much more accurate image that is rendered with every single pixel having the exact same level of detail.

Edited, Apr 13th 2007 10:12am by Pergatory

Nope sure don't.

This kind of stemmed from the smn forums, at least it has today.I did it and it's really nice.I'm using a G-Force 7600 512 MB video card.It isn't really "top of the line", but it all worked out nicely.I'm using 2560x2048 background resolution, and its really nice.

I'm sure i could go alot farther, but i don't see that the difference will be much better.It may be a bit sharper, but i really dont want to lose system performance over it.

I still need to check out the mapping though. Maybe tomorrow. :)

switched from 1024x1024 to 1280x800 (my screen res) and my framerate doubled...sweet

Edited, Apr 14th 2007 11:25am by PerfectPrime

Sorry for the slow response... I don't know why SE did it that way. There's no way to really have defaults that match all screen resolutions because people have different aspect ratios. You could give 800x600, 1024x768, and 1280x1024 as defaults and that would probably cover most people but it seems SE took a more generic approach and just used square resolutions. This, to me, screams management decision. A programmer didn't make that call, a manager did. Some programmer set up a side-by-side demo of the various options and the manager said, "I like square better" and boom. There you have it.


This question is a bit confusing... The screen resolution is the actual physical resolution of the screen. If you double this, windows doesn't need to shrink the image down because you are actually allowing the monitor to render with that extra detail. The problem is, the monitor has to support that resolution. For example, your LCD probably doesn't support 2560x2048 resolution... some CRT's will but LCD's usually have a native resolution (often 1280x1024) and only support that resolution and 2 or 3 below it (1024, 800, 640).

However, there is something similar with LCD monitors to what you see with a low background resolution. If you set screen resolution to lower than the native resolution of the LCD, it will have to expand the image out. LCD's cannot change the number of pixels they have, it's always the same. I'm willing to bet running the game with 800x600 screen res and 800x600 or higher background res would look very similar to running the game with a 1280x1024 screen res and 800x600 background. So maybe that was the source of your confusion when you saw a familiar-looking loss of quality. However, you generally can't set a screen resolution beyond the native resolution of an LCD, so you'll never get into a situation where the image is being reduced in detail in order to display on the screen.

This is one of my pet peeves with LCD's... CRT's can actually physically change the number of pixels used to display the image. If you're running in 800x600 on a CRT, it doesn't look like 800x600 stretched onto a 1280x1024 display... /sigh I miss my CRT...

Edited, Apr 16th 2007 8:22am by Pergatory

29 FPS is the limit in this game I think, so that's a good sign. It means your computer probably has untapped potential, though the 6800 is getting to be a bit dated. You do seem to have more than enough memory and a capable processor.

You'd probably have a bit of trouble at 2x, unless you compromised some other settings like turning up texture compression and such. No harm in trying though, try a background resolution of maybe 1.5x your screen res and see how you like it.

If you're feeling nervous about the changes, read the Registry Overview paragraph on the Wiki that I linked earlier. It talks briefly about how to use Regedit, and more importantly, how to make backups of your current settings so that if you mess things up then all you have to do is double-click the file and it'll restore your settings. Just be very careful not to modify anything ASIDE from the things discussed in this thread. If you go around changing things and moving/deleting things that you don't understand, you may quickly find not just FFXI broken but your whole computer. The registry is a very critical component where many programs, including Windows, store their settings.