Mucky Wucky – Preset for Gameplay and (maybe) Cinematic DOF (Gshade) (Ryzen APU friendly)
Idea around the preset
This preset is based on vanilla, and meant to enhance it, not drastically change it. Its meant to better shade characters with mildly better occlusion while not going overboard. Overboard would be what I was originally doing, which is stacking three MXAO shaders for a LOT of occlusion. Thats very costly and in the end just makes the contrast look whack. Instead for this preset I decided to take what vanilla tries to do with HBAO+ Quality and make it a little better looking on character models. Only problem with that is that MXAO eats performance, which is why I had to go through a few shaders and tweak game settings for better performance. Thus I ended up with a preset based around performance, on vanilla, while still undoing the greyish mess and adding to the mildly “okay” occlusion that vanilla does.
Things to know
For a Ryzen APU, you will likely have to run the low preset. In the graphics settings area there is some information that could help you a fair bit.
This is a preset based on some of my earlier tinkering with Gshade, however compared to my previous presets this is focused on optimization. In game, running lower than max occlusion settings (HBAO+: Standard) if you play at max settings is advised as you gain around 6 FPS without any huge loss in visuals. The reshade preset takes care of some of it through the PPFX SSDO shader. That is what I would recommend even for people struggling to reach 60 with reshade or people struggling to stay above 60 with a high refresh rate monitor.
Some people find the DOF a little jarring, namely magic DOF as it does not have a smooth focus. At some point I may tweak ADOF to do something similar but I haven’t gotten around to it. For now, I will leave DOF as a second option.
I may add more preview images if I get lazy. Feel free to upload your own,just please flag/name files to warn of spoilers and just avoid posting certain late game areas in general.
There is now more than a very little chance of me checking the comments on this often. Feel free to comment and if I see it I will answer If there are any complaints or you don’t like a particular part of the preset, I would love to hear, and if you perhaps know a bit more about configuring re-shade shaders I would love to hear as well!
When 7.0’s graphical update comes out I may or may not continue to mess with Gshade depending on how good it looks and what performance is offered.
Installation
To install, head to your final fantasy 14 directory, which you may either already know the location of and if you do not it should be in
C:\Program Files(x86)\SquareEnix\FINAL FANTASY XIV – A Realm Reborn\game
Then unzip the download from this mod page into the gshade-presets folder. You could also open this folder from Gshade’s ownmenu by pressing the … in the top right of the gshade menu.
Then select the folder muckywucky from the gshade menu and select either mucky_wucky for the regular preset or mucky_wucky_dof for the light DOF. For maximum performance, read the graphics settings section and change your in game graphics settings. Use the preset mucky_wucky_low.
Graphics settings in game
I recently just added the preset I use on my laptop, which has a Ryzen APU that can barely run this game play-ably even at the lowest settings. It only adjusts the colors, and only has a loss of around 10 frames or so. The settings for maximum performance while maintaining graphical quality within the game are as follows:
First set the overall graphics setting to Laptop standard.Then enable Parallax occlusion.Set grass quality to normal.
Turn the shadow resolution to 512p then set the shadow softening to strong.
Set screen space ambient occlusion to either light or strong depending on your hardware, and maybe higher if it can handle the FPS loss. Each occlusion setting loses around 5 FPS, and quality loses around 8.
If that still isn’t working to you, set your game to full-screen and change your resolution to 1600:900 at 60hz. This is the in between between 1080p and 720p and I have found that it looks pretty okay for being a lower resolution on a 1080p display.
Play in fullscreen if you still have issues. If you run at a lower resolution you will be stuck using fullscreen anyways. Unfortunately you may not be able to use ACT and some overlays, but its better than the game being unplayable. Make sure to read the stuttering section below that mentions disabling fullscreen optimization, as it can also give an FPS boost and the setting can sometimes cause stuttering.
For original and DOF
Highest possible settings if your PC can run it
Enable the box under general named occlusion culling.
Turn on low-detail models on shadows if you so desire, I run this because shadow softening does a pretty dang good job of covering this up.
Set Screen Space Ambient Occlusion to HBAO+: Standard
Stuttering in Final Fantasy 14(when you name a category so it shows up in search results. May the troubled see this segment)
Try turning off Fullscreen Optimization. This is a setting that Windows automatically applies and may re-apply at times. It is a curse. For how to do this, I link the wise sages of r/ffxiv. I also applied this to my launcher shortcut as well. I play in borderless, but somehow it helped? It may have been changing refreshrates.
If you run multiple monitors at different refresh-rates, try making the refresh-rates even divisors. Ex. 144hz/72hz, 120hz/60hz. Don’t ask me why this works, but I assume it has something to do with 144/60 being a floating point number and GPU drivers not liking that. For people with 60hz monitors this may involve either underclocking or overclocking your main display. That is something you must google and investigate, as I do not want to be involved in possibly broken hardware.
Doing both of these fixed both stuttering I had in FF14 and videos freezing in windows 11 while FF14 was launched and selected as the active window.
DX11 errors
There is not much information on fixing these because the causes are typically a per-system thing and are unique to the system currently experiencing the error. However I will list some things that may help, and a few things I did that stopped my problems.
Certain reshade shaders are weird and can cause this. Typically its obvious as you turn it on and you crash, but it wouldn’t surprise me if some were more subtle. This preset and the past few iterations I’ve had have given me little grief, so I’m fairly sure this is safe. If you like to edit reshade presets and are getting errors, turn off some shaders one by one to troubleshoot.
The first thing would be to try updating your GPU drivers. That is a pretty quick google so I won’t go through that here.
Next would be to completely reinstall your GPU drivers and to use DDU to do so. Doing this will completely wipe the drivers off of your system. From there either reinstall them from the manufacturers website or let windows do the work for you. Again, google is your friend on how to do this. There are a lot of tutorials on how to do this and several youtube videos. Just look up “How to uninstall GPU drivers with DDU.”
After this try reinstalling FF14. Now I will mention the scuffed way to do it that avoids re-downloading all 70 gigs. In the game folder there is a folder called sqpack. (Directories are above in the installation section) This contains the game files. Move this somewhere safe on your drive, then run the uninstaller. Reinstall the game and as soon as it starts to download close it. Then copy the completely downloaded sqpack folder back into the game folder. It may still download a few files, or base ARR as the launcher is what I like to call “Japanese code,” meaning it doesn’t like to do things in a smooth manner. No offense, but look at their web design. You’ll see what I mean.
If that does not work, try moving your SquareEnix directory out of Program FIles (x86). The game doesn’t care where it launches, just that its inside this folder. From there create a shortcut to the ffxivboot or ffxivboot64 executable depending on your computers bits (Should be 64) and move that to your desktop. Maybe it’ll fix some weird NTFS perms, you never know what Windows likes to do with those….
That’s all of the software ideas I have. My issues were caused by hardware mainly ans possibly reshade. I was also having a glitch that happens with nvidia cards pascal and up where the middle section of your screen is cut out and sent to the edge of the monitor, as well as some pretty bad coil whine that had me taking apart my GPU to redo thermal pads on the memory and mosfets. Surprisingly I have not had a dx11 error since then, nor the screen splitting issue. To do something like this without taking a 500 dollar graphics card apart (audible sweating) you could decrease your GPU power limit and memory speed in MSI afterburner and see what that does for you. The errors could definitely be GPU stability related, especially on older and heavily used cards that have worn out thermal pads and thermal interface materials. You could also try increasing GPU fan speed as well but that’s kind of loud and annoying, not to mention not too great for the fan. Those like to go out so watch them.
