You’ll be able to see light refract and waver when hitting water. This is probably the easiest difference to see. It was impossible with DirectX 9, but with DirectX 11 you’ll be able to see reflected lights and even character reflections in finely polished floors. This can be seen in a variety of places throughout the game. By using tessellation, it’s possible to create a more realistic three-dimensional portrayal of shimmering water than with DirectX 9, in which water effects were drawn on a single plane. The left side is the current game running DirectX 9, and the right side is the DirectX 11 version. He then went on to show off the following slides to demonstrate the subtle changes. Rather, the differences pertain to some of the finer aspects of the game’s graphical quality,” director Naoki Yoshida said. “Please keep in mind that by going from DirectX 9 to DirectX 11, you won’t necessarily see any obvious dramatic changes. During a recent “Letter From the Producer” Q&A, Square provided a few visual examples of what sort of graphical improvements the DirectX 11 client will bring.
Square Enix plan on releasing a DirectX 11 client for Final Fantasy XIV on PC at the same time as the game’s upcoming Heavensward expansion.
