Final Fantasy 15 Windows Edition is finally available which brings along big promises such as the ability to play its in 4K resolution and up to 120fps. Final Fantasy 15 on the consoles has been a rather mixed case of technical performance. Last year, we analyzed both the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X versions and we found the differences between them to be rather miniscule. To recap, the Xbox One X version ran at 3200×1800 resolution without any sort of checkerboard rendering whereas the PS4 Pro build managed to achieve 3360×1890 through checkerboarding. It was a rather strange case, wherein despite having a more powerful hardware, Square Enix were unable to completely utilize the power of the Xbox One X.
With the PC version now out, we decided to give the game a test run. Interestingly, Square Enix have provided specs for 4K gameplay which requires Intel Core i7-7700 or an AMD Ryzen 5 1600X, GeForce GTX 1080 Ti and 16GB of memory. Our test build includes an NVIDIA GTX 1080Ti, 16GB of GDDR4 memory and a Ryzen 7 1700 CPU, which suprasses the 4K requirement. The game features a rather extensive set of graphical parameters which includes the likes of LOD, Shadow Quality, Ambient Occlusion and Filtering. The game also supports Nvidia Gameworks which includes options for Hairworks, ShadowWorks among others.
As expected the game looks rather sharp compared to its console counterparts. Character models, hair effects, draw distances…all are better on the PC port. The fur effects on monsters look amazing, thanks to Nvidia HairWorks. But for some reason or the other, this upgrade is not consistent across the areas we tested. Not only did we witnessed frame rate drops, we also experienced a rather strange blurring issue for distant objects. Final Fantasy 15 on consoles never really did had a great image quality but it’s suprising to see the image quality suffer in some areas the PC version as well. This is specially prevelant while you are driving your car where the blurring effect is clearly visible along with what looks a buggy implementation of 16 X Anisotropic filtering.
This is quite disappointing as the game should basically have no issues on this kind of hardware. Howevere, from a console vs PC point of view, the difference is quite clear. PC trumps both the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X versions by huge margins in terms of several graphical parameters. There are a lot of things here, that simply don’t exist on consoles and for anyone who has a beefy PC, Final Fantasy 15 is a must play game. Hopefully Square Enix will release a patch or two to address the blurry image and performance issues as it could definitely impact the experience for some players.
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