There is no doubt that Final Fantasy 15 looks pretty amazing on the PlayStation 4 Pro and is perhaps the ideal way to experience this year’s best role playing game. However, where does this leave the base PS4 and Xbox One players who undoubtedly forms the majority of the consumer base that are going to play Final Fantasy 15? If the pre-release demos of Final Fantasy 15 were anything to go by, the performance on both consoles along with image quality was a big concern. None of the consoles were able to achieve a consistent 30 frames per second, specially the Xbox One which also struggled with sub-HD image quality.
Fortunately, the final versions of both the PS4 and Xbox One have been optimized to run at an almost locked 30 frames per second with a dynamic resolution in place. As is the norm for the last several years, the PlayStation 4 once again takes the lead here with a better resolution overall. The PS4 version runs with a dynamic resolution up to 1080p whereas the Xbox One runs up to 900p. Fortunately, the use of a temporal anti-aliasing solution manages to avoid the blurry look and feel that comes along with a sub-HD resolution. We have seen its implementation in games like as DOOM and it does a fantastic job for games that are running under 1080p resolution.
Other than the resolution differences, there isn’t much of a difference between the two platforms. Both suffer from texture streaming issues which results into pop in, but it’s limited and does not detract the player from the experience. Core assets are largely the same however we did manage to find a couple of instances where the shadows were rendered a bit late on the Xbox One. We are not sure whether this is an issue on the base PlayStation 4 but it was something that we witnessed on the Xbox One.
Other graphical assets such as texture quality, draw distance, post processing effects, volumetric and alpha effects and even screen space and water reflection quality remain largely the same on both versions. It seems that Square Enix, after months of optimization, finally managed to find the right balance for Final Fantasy 15 on both consoles and it works well within the confines of each hardware’s limitations. In the end, whichever platform you play on, Final Fantasy 15 provides a decent experience in terms of performance. Image quality wise, the PS4 Pro is where you need to play the game on. The base PS4 version has a better image quality than the Xbox One but you would need to place them side by side to see the differences.
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