Final Fantasy Xv Pc Port

Final Fantasy fifteen'due south PC port unlocks the game's full visual potential

The Windows Edition takes on the Xbox One X version.

There's always been the sense that nosotros've not been able to experience the definitive version of Final Fantasy xv, that today'south console hardware only doesn't have the horsepower to fully deliver the developers' original vision for the game. PlayStation 4 and Xbox One X have upped resolution and increased fidelity over the original releases, but fundamentally, there's still the sense that the game simply has much more to offer. Only now with the release of the PC version practice we get to see the Luminous Studios engine fully unleashed. Yeah, the hardware demands can exist onerous - staggering even - if you want to see everything but the visual return is outstanding.

Showtime of all, the concluding code is improved over its initial outing in the benchmark released last calendar month - GameWorks and other level of particular bug are greatly improved and overall frame-rates are higher, but AMD functioning is still not quite where it should exist - something we'll be looking at in more depth after on. For at present, we'll exist looking at the tangible benefits of playing Final Fantasy fifteen on PC - and they are legion.

First of all, at that place are the basics: performance and resolution. Foursquare-Enix's port has the exclusive full-screen and v-sync options bizarrely omitted from the benchmark, along with a vast range of tweakables to experiment with, just the fundamentals are in place too: arbitrary resolutions are supported every bit is ultra-wide support (we ran a lot of the game at the incomparably not-standard 3840x1600 and everything just worked fine) while in-game frame-rates up to 120fps are confirmed.

Beyond that, information technology's all nearly delving into the presets to meet what's new and what settings tin can be tied to console equivalents - we used Xbox One Ten hither as our comparison signal every bit by and large, it's the best iteration of the game you tin can buy for the other formats. By and large speaking, the PC tends to offering iii options per setting - low, average and loftier (though a select few, like shadows, offering a 'highest' pick too). Xbox One X essentially delivers average on all points, though its shadows are equivalent to PC's loftier preset, and the motion blur toggle is set to 'on'.

Hither'southward our visual breakup of Terminal Fantasy 15 on PC, and the large benefits gained from the PC version and its advanced settings.

Across that, Final Fantasy 15 delivers just two anti-aliasing options - FXAA and TAA - with consoles using the latter, though its GPU requirement is surprisingly high in the PC build. It is worth sticking with TAA though, as many of the artistic choices (graphic symbol hair for example) seems to congenital around this technology existence active at all times, though the presentation does look rather blurry at 1080p or lower resolutions.

So there's the potential to scale back, to run on less capable hardware, but beingness PC, the emphasis is all about pushing on to higher visual standards. In this respect, in that location's a wealth of potential for tweaking and the good news is that the vast majority of options are adaptable in-game without the need to restart. The Model LOD choice is a skilful place to kickoff - the game's vast vistas look immensely richer when this is scaled up to the high setting, only with more objects to procedure, a strong CPU is required to gear up the richer visuals in addition to actually having the GPU power to return them. Geomapping is a PC exclusive feature also worth a look, adding a layer of tessellation to many ground features.

But without veering into Nvidia-specific GameWorks effects, further enhancements over the consoles come via an optional, downloadable assets pack. Information technology's a vast download - 63GB in total - only effectually 50GB of this takes the class of high quality 4K video cutscenes. Despite being tailored for college resolution screens, the enhanced console versions of Final Fantasy 15 practice non go these sequences and neither do they go the higher detail artwork that accounts for the residue of the download. However, engaging the asset pack doesn't just innovate college precision art - it can drastically arrange the look of foliage, for example, and aspects of it deviate from the original vision of the game.

Do you lose that much by not having the asset pack running? We don't think so and texture quality in-game tends to exist based on how much memory you allocate to the TRAM setting. This is a preset that needs to be treated with care: set to its 'highest' level, you'll demand a 12GB GPU to ensure that the setting tin piece of work at its all-time, with 8GB cards better suited to the high setting. It's a difficult option to piece of work with, since the game gives you picayune indication of how it works and what its requirements are. At that place'southward a good take chances of introducing stutter via swapping betwixt GPU and system memory if this pick is set too high.

Nvidia GameWorks features account for the rest of the more than significant upgrades and the almost useful pick is TurfEffects. This swaps out the default grass with a more than pleasing event in-game - it's more dense, it's more than interactive and it's been added near everywhere. It also addresses an issue we had with the standard grass, which would sometimes flicker in an cruddy manner. Beyond that, we have the contentious HairWorks feature, which in the benchmark, acquired a big performance hitting regardless of whether objects were really present or not in the scene. This bug appears to take been stock-still, just like to the criterion, only a select range of beasts in-game actually use it - and information technology'southward not used on the character hair at all.

Nvidia VXAO is also a beautiful effect, only its performance bear on tends to vary according to how many objects are in the scene. It's a big visual upgrade, but it's definitely one for those using GTX 1070 level hardware or improve and even so, GPU resources may be meliorate spent elsewhere. Rounding off the options is Nvidia ShadowLibs - an choice for Maxwell or Pascal users (AMD won't work hither) that uses conservative rasterisation for more than precise, more realistic shadows. Information technology'due south not a game-changer, but the functioning striking isn't huge so information technology'due south well worth checking out if you have a higher-terminate card.

Ultimately and so, the console versions of Final Fantasy 15 are operating at what Square-Enix defines as 'average' in PC terms - and for the about office, that's absolutely fine, particularly if you lot're playing on Xbox One X, which has the cleanest epitome quality (and a nice shadow quality upgrade). Some settings - like lighting and filtering quality - don't seem to offer that much of an upgrade in moving from average to anything higher. And other settings such as shadow quality actually look fine on the boilerplate preset - you become cleaner lines and distance enhancements, but the cost in CPU and GPU processing is high.

Other enhancements used in combination tin can be genuinely revelatory though - pushing out model LODs and engaging TurfEffects and Geomapping adds so much additional detail, while many of the other aspects of the game do good immensely from running at higher resolutions, cleaning upwardly a lot of the blur found in the original console versions. While the dynamic scaler establish in the older versions isn't present on PC, you can at least engage upscaling or downsampling, depending on your GPU and monitor resolution. For example, 75% of native resolution when continued to a 4K screen delivers a native 1620p but it however holds up and represents a worthy merchandise if yous tin can claw your fashion to 60fps in the process.

And expect to see a lot of talk most how optimal this game is on PC - it's certainly punishing and it is a case of picking your battles, of attempting to get a good balance betwixt visual allegiance and performance, but the foundations are certainly at that place for a solid port. On an Intel Cadre i9 7900X, Final Fantasy 15 distributed workloads fairly evenly across all 20 available threads, so there's the base of operations of practiced scalability there.

Performance issues are likely to be GPU-based in nature - we've already noticed that AMD hardware isn't keen on the geomapping feature, though TurfEffects is fine. Using an AMD GPU also seems to crusade some other foreign issues - for example, SMT on a Ryzen CPU harms performance with a Radeon card, but not an Nvidia. There'southward the sense that at the GPU driver side at least, there'southward still plenty of work that needs to be done.

Overall though, this is a scalable port that looks simply beautiful, and rewards PC gamers with a big agglomeration of additional extras and options over console players. Square-Enix has pushed the boat out hither to actually show us what their engine can practise, and information technology's been fantastic to return to this game and to really encounter what the Luminous technology is capable of delivering.