Please help me optimize my graphics

[Lokeals_companions]

My husband's computer is pretty high end but he thinks that my computer can do the same with DDO and so far neither I nor him can prove his statement correct. Somehow his computer beautifies the game in such a way that makes me want to play it.

Right now we are trying to get directx 12 to work on DDO, and so far only Directx 11 is showing up, I wish to try and resolve this first!

[Melkazar]

If the option for Direct X 12 is missing then it usually means your computer cannot run it.

Tell us more about your computer. How much RAM, what operating system, video card, etc.

I have generally found that setting textures to high and using trilinear setting allows a pretty good looking view without too much impact on performance. The anistropic settings can be a drain on some systems. Using post processing pretties up things like water and light glow. I set particles and bloom down to help performance.

[ArgentMage]

The game has "standard" and "high-def" texture packs. When you run the installer, it will do the
standard-def install, then prompt you to install the high-def pack if it detects a nicer graphics card.

One trick I've found is that if you log in to your computer using a UserId that has never run DDO,
(and you can tell because it will present you with two license agreements), it may then prompt
you to install the high-res pack.

[sebastianosmith]

First things first - DDO has no direct support for DX12 so stop looking for it. It supports DX11 shaders, texture and particle maps, but that's about it.

Insofar as making the game look better...

As ArgentMage said, utilizing the hires textures will make some things look better, but those may take longer to load depending on what medium the game resides. Cranking up your AA (anti-aliasing) to x4 or x8 can make a noticeable difference. Any higher than that (x16) is probably not going to look any better and might send the FPS into the basement depending on what GPU you're running. Speaking of GPUs, letting us know what you have would go a long way towards helping us optimize the game. Aside from that, go into Advanced Graphics, set everything to the highest setting and see how it looks and responds. If it crawls like a snail with bad knees, back off on some of the DX10-11 specific settings until it get to an acceptable frame rate, like around 40-60 FPS.