Final Fantasy XVI PC benchmarks: Poorly optimized and needs framegen just to hit 60 fps on a lot of GPUs

[Admin]

The PC port of Final Fantasy XVI delivers very poor performance, even on the fastest GPUs. You basically need upscaling and framegen just to break 60 fps with most graphics cards, with a 30 fps cap in all the in-engine cutscenes.

Final Fantasy XVI PC benchmarks: Poorly optimized and needs framegen just to hit 60 fps on a lot of GPUs : Read more

 

[Roland Of Gilead]

I just don't get the logic. Why do Devs do this? Make a game that runs like a turkey, and is hardly playable on a high end machine. Yes, I know these are ports, but c'mon, can't they try a little harder to make it run better on lower end hardware (and I'm talking about strong enough mid range gaming systems in this case) and optimize before release.

Surely this game won't sell much and if it does, there would be refund requests all over the place. If they rule out 60-80% of the gaming public that don't have high end systems, how will they ever sell enough to make any money from it?

 

[CelicaGT]

I'm getting 50-80fps on a 4060 Laptop with upscaling and NO FRAMEGEN on otherwise max settings, 1080p, latest drivers. I haven't tried on my 4070Ti equipped desktop at 1440p yet. Curious to see the results, I'll post anything interesting when I do, currently inbound to Stuttgart on the desktop, MSFS2020...

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

I'm getting 50-80fps on a 4060 Laptop with upscaling and NO FRAMEGEN on otherwise max settings, 1080p, latest drivers. I haven't tried on my 4070Ti equipped desktop at 1440p yet. Curious to see the results, I'll post anything interesting when I do, currently inbound to Stuttgart on the desktop, MSFS2020...

1080p with upscaling on dynamic will potentially render at significantly lower resolution. Even quality mode would be 720p, less than half the pixels of native. In games that are GPU limited, that can directly translate into nearly double the performance.

The area of the game you’re in also matters. I did all my tests running the same route in the town of Lostwing. It seemed to be more demanding than many of the opening areas, definitely more demanding than the Hideaway at least.

 

[CelicaGT]

1080p with upscaling on dynamic will potentially render at significantly lower resolution. Even quality mode would be 720p, less than half the pixels of native. In games that are GPU limited, that can directly translate into nearly double the performance.

The area of the game you’re in also matters. I did all my tests running the same route in the town of Lostwing. It seemed to be more demanding than many of the opening areas, definitely more demanding than the Hideaway at least.

Oh, thanks for the location as I was going to ask. As for the scaling I am aware, I only brought it up as a comparison to the non Frame Gen results. I'm messing around with it right now on the desktop and all I've discovered so far is that HDR causes severe strobing when the framerates drop. Probably an HDR/AutoHDR thing but we'll see.

 

[Notton]

How do you manage to port something this poorly when the base hardware is an 8-core zen2 with 36CU RDNA2 graphics?
Square-Enix stagnation and incompetence is really showing through this time.

 

[hotaru251]

To get around that, we've got upscaling and framegen technologies. Those are, frankly, becoming a crutch in far too many games. DLSS was originally designed to try and allow for ray tracing on GPUs that just weren't quite up to the task. Now it's evolved into a way to get higher performance in all games, and it's joined by FSR and XeSS.

and again we are shown that devs will always do the fastest/cheapest method to making a game if given chance.

DLSS was by design supposed to help under performing gpu's do better fps. (which it did)
but as multiple games have shown over the yrs (starfield, remnant2, etc) devs stopped using it as a way to help more people play their game w/o selling an organ & instead use it to skimp out on optimizing their games & now we get games that have such high spec req on gpu side and yet...games awful for that cost.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

Why optimize when you have "AI" to make it playable!

 

[CelicaGT]

Interesting, so indeed it does run like the dogs breakfast in Lostwing, but I am seeing slightly better results than the article. With all upscaling disabled, Frame Gen disabled, otherwise Ultra settings at 1440p and wandering around the periphery of Lostwing my lows are about 45fps, highs around 70fps. This is on the rig in my sig, Ryzen 7 5800X3D and a 4070 Ti. I wonder if there is a general AMD bias here? Perhaps some 3D Vcache love?Regardless, I agree with Jarreds closing thoughts. Scaling and Frame generation will be a requirement in this title for lesser rigs. Based on my observations I could reasonably play the game without them but will stick with some scaling at least. I paid for 165Hz displays, I want to use them.

Some other thoughts:

-30fps cutscenes are JARRING.

-Make sure to disable AutoHDR in Win11, it fights with the native HDR mode and causes some severe strobing.

-Gameplay is in the eye of the beholder. I had already seen the game on PS5 (my partner played) so I knew beforehand how simplistic the combat is. Remove the Rings of Timely Strikes/Focus/Evasion unless you enjoy mashing the attack button only...

 

[Warcrown]

Nobody actually expected it to be optimized right? That's considered taboo in 2024

 

[oofdragon]

They probably didn't have the resources/time to optimize and that's that. On other news most people here always gamed on consoles at 30fps, this is just another virtual reality/fake title to waste your time so who cares. Play it at 30fps or 120fps the experience is virtually the same

 

[TeamRed2024]

I've never played any of the FF games on any platform... but I did download this benchmark the other night to test out the new rig and it ran great. I'll have to doublecheck the scores when I get home... I want to say it was like 18,000 pts in Ultra 4K but don't quote me on that.

It did run from beginning to end very smooth and without issues. One giant cartoon IMO.

 

[BadBoyGreek]

They probably didn't have the resources/time to optimize and that's that. On other news most people here always gamed on consoles at 30fps, this is just another virtual reality/fake title to waste your time so who cares. Play it at 30fps or 120fps the experience is virtually the same

I would disagree on the "didn't have time" to optimize bit. Although Squenix tried to be coy on a PC port, it was pretty much planned from day one. So from the date of the PS5 release to PC release, they had about 15 months.

Granted, maybe they didn't start on the PC port right away... but that's a very strong "maybe". Lack of enough resources could also have been a potential "maybe". I think the most likely explanation is simply incompetence on the part of Squenix. They haven't exactly had the best track record porting their games to the PC from consoles, and it looks like the situation with FFXVI is no different. They seem to do fine working on console releases when they're locked into very specific hardware, but when it comes to trying to work on PC releases where they have to try and optimize across radically different hardware and vendor specific rendering techniques between Nvidia and AMD, they're out to lunch.

 

[valthuer]

I've never played any of the FF games on any platform... but I did download this benchmark the other night to test out the new rig and it ran great. I'll have to doublecheck the scores when I get home... I want to say it was like 18,000 pts in Ultra 4K but don't quote me on that.

It did run from beginning to end very smooth and without issues. One giant cartoon IMO.

Same here: 18688 points, at 4K Maximum.

Played the Final Fantasy XVI demo as well. Did not encounter any issues. At 4K Ultra, FPS is anywhere between 60 and 85. Game's graphics seem quite outdated, though.

 

[hotaru251]

I just don't get the logic. Why do Devs do this? Make a game that runs like a turkey, and is hardly playable on a high end machine.

becasue its not the devs choice.

Devs are given resources & timelines and they have to work within that.
The people who are in control of game don't care abotu excuses.

they can release a AAA game becasue...its gonna sell by the branding itself and once they have your $? who cares how it runs for user they got the $.


DLSS just enabled comapnies to skip optimizing and just brute force it & if theres issue? "just use dlss/frame gen" ignoring the issue existing as theres a work around.

its sadly what many people knew was coming.

 

[Amdlova]

If you guys are struggling to get some fps on this game. I don't even try.
Poorly optimized games is the new thing.
With Low tdp cpu it's some of these games need to increase the power to keep the Fps without hiccups. Others keep the boost way higher than the specifications.

 

[TeamRed2024]

Same here: 18688 points, at 4K Maximum.

Played the Final Fantasy XVI demo as well. Did not encounter any issues. At 4K Ultra, FPS is anywhere between 60 and 85. Game's graphics seem quite outdated, though.

18950. Looks like DLSS was on as well.

 

[CelicaGT]

18950. Looks like DLSS was on as well.

Is there a XVI(16) bench or are you guys running the XV and XIV(DawnTrail) benches? Colour me confused. FWIW I play all of the above.

 

[TeamRed2024]

Is there a XVI(16) bench or are you guys running the XV and XIV(DawnTrail) benches? Colour me confused. FWIW I play all of the above.

FWIW I've never played any... and upon close up inspection I guess it is Dawntrail. Shows you what I know about the series. Why was I thinking it was a bench of the new game? I have no idea.

 

[UnforcedERROR]

If this was another developer I'd be surprised, but Square have been notoriously meh with their ports. Especially relative to their competition, where someone like Atlus does very well in bringing their games over.

You can just look at their history of ports needing community support to make them decent. Nier Automata's release was abysmal with poor resolution and no 60 fps, CT is a terrible mobile port with weird menus, FF13 had performance and resolution issues, and the double release of DQ11 where the second version retained the worse Switch textures.

It's just constant laziness. I get Japan's market for PC gaming is small, but it's still weird to see the lack of an attempt to improve.

 

[Zeolysse]

I don't really get that, I have no issue running the game at 1080p max settings with my old 1080ti. I get something like 45-50fps which is a lot for a 10 years old gpu. It seams pretty well optimized to me.