There was no shortage of controversy when Square Enix announced that Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade would be coming to PC exclusively on the Epic Games Store. Touting a $70 price tag without region pricing made things worse. But if that weren’t enough, it also seems that performance isn’t very good.
Digital Foundry’s Alexander Battaglia first tweeted about how, “RTSS does not seem to pick up the framerate issues really in Final Fantasy 7 Remake as far as I can tell. It is telling you the game is running at 60 when it sure as hell is not. PresentMon is not reflecting what is on screen.” He noted that this was observed in The Medium and No Man’s Sky OGL (aka OpenGL which was replaced later with Vulkan and provided significant performance gains).
Senior staff writer John Linneman corroborated this, noting that, “Alex sent his clips over for us to check out and, yeah, the PC port of Final Fantasy 7 Remake is terrible. He captured this using an RTX 3090 + 10900k at just 1080p and it’s a mess. The smooth presentation was central to its story telling and this version compromises it.” Keep in mind that those specs are well and above the recommended requirements.
This isn’t the first troubled PC port for a game that Square Enix has ever released (and likely won’t be the last). However, a PC port has apparently been in the wings since the PS4 version’s demo first leaked. Even if actual development didn’t begin on the same until after the release of Intergrade on PS5, it’s highly contentious that the publisher would charge PS5 exclusive-level prices for this version.
Time will tell if these performance issues are across a larger user base so stay tuned. You can check out our review for Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade here.