Final Fantasy 16 is highly demanding on PC

We had a lot of praise for Final Fantasy 16 when it arrived last year on PS5, bringing excellent visuals with stable performance – at least at 30fps. The PC version has the potential to boost visuals further while allowing for much better frame-rates at the same time and after a demo last month, the full release is finally available. After testing it, it’s clear that the PS5 version’s 60fps performance woes are a little more understandable, and there’s plenty more to say about the game’s technical implementation on PC.

To recap, the PS5 version could dip to as low as 720p in performance mode, while still offering frame-rates well below 60fps – even in the 40s in some cases. On PC, running at 1440p with DLSS and dynamic resolution scaling (DRS) engaged on an mainstream-spec machine with a Ryzen 5 3600 and RTX 2070 Super, it was immediately obvious that GPU load is heavy and can vary significantly from scene to scene. It was possible to see PS5-style frame-rates in heavier scenes, and it’s clear that the game was designed around that 30fps update rate with DRS to smooth out the swings in GPU load. The first recommendation is to use DRS on PC as well then, rather than a fixed high resolution, even with DLSS active.

The PC demo originally had quite variable frame delivery, with frequent, noticeable frame-time stutters, but the final release does improve in this regard. We saw around six to eight stutters in the first three hours of play, and often in occasions where you wouldn’t expect shader compilation stutter to occur. There were also periods of intense GPU load, such as at the beginning or end of a cutscene, and these caused the frame-rate to drop below the 30fps cap of the cutscene, even when playing at an internal resolution of 360p. Therefore, on a more low-end rig, you may want to wait for further patches to hopefully address these issues.

On a top-end gaming PC with a Core i7 13700K and RTX 4090, these issues are less noticeable and the game scales beyond what’s possible on PS5. At max settings with 4K DLAA or DLSS quality, you get a significantly cleaner 60fps presentation than on PS5, free of aliasing and break-up, allowing the already detailed artwork to shine. Some small frame-rate drops are still possible, such as when there’s plenty of alpha effects on-screen, but such moments are few and far between.

It’s also possible to engage frame generation (DLSS or FSR) to boost frame-rates higher at the expense of input lag. In-engine cutscenes remain capped at 30fps, presumably to match other pre-rendered cutscenes at 30fps, with similar drops to the low-end system. Thankfully, there is a solution: a tool called FF16Fix uncaps in-engine cutscenes and produces more stable results at 60fps or higher.

Objectively, this is probably one of the most GPU-heavy games we’ve seen this generation, despite not featuring ray tracing on console, and upsampling technologies like DLSS and FSR are required to hit a stable 60fps, working in combination with dynamic resolution scaling. DRS really does seem essential then, as we suspect that the game’s rendering budgets were built around this technique – something that’s not going to sit easily with users in the PC space.

There are some other oddities with the PC version. The game doesn’t support any aspect ratios wider than 16:9, which is a shame for any modern games. Pre-rendered cutscenes also present at your input resolution, rather than your output resolution, with a clumsy nearest neighbour upscale on top – so presenting them at the output resolution with a bicubic or bilinear upscale if necessary would improve their quality significantly. Post-processing is also quite heavy, and its resolution is typically your internal resolution, so you can see more artefacts, such as flickering with depth of field when using DLSS in performance mode. A more granular options menu that increased the resolution of these effects would be warranted.

Speaking of the settings, there are some options to play with here to balance fidelity and performance, and we started by trying to mimic the trade-offs taken by the PS5’s performance mode. The most important setting is DRS, as we’ve explained, but there are some other settings that can also boost performance. For example, the setting labelled “graphical fidelity” changes the game’s level of detail, and here, mid offers a three percent uplift in performance. Low is faster, but loses too much detail in our view. Similarly, shadow quality can be set to mid to gain 6.5 percent extra performance.

The other settings are generally less impactful in terms of performance, and can be kept on the high setting. This includes texture quality, terrain detail, water quality, clutter density and NPC quality. Screen-space reflections (SSR), ambient occlusion (AO) and the bloom shader can all be enabled, while variable rate shading can be disabled.

Ultimately then, Final Fantasy 16 is quite straightforward, with only a few knobs to adjust to optimise for your hardware. More fine-grained controls, such as having quality levels for SSR and ambient occlusion rather than just on and off, would provide more meaningful choices to players. Right now though, at the expense of stressing the point to excess, the use of dynamic resolution scaling is essential.

Before we wrap up, it’s worth speculating on how this game might run on PS5 Pro, given what we’ve learned from the PC version – even though the game currently isn’t listed as receiving PS5 Pro support. In short, it’s possible we’d see PSSR upscaling used to get to 1440p, rather than 4K, given how heavy the game is even on high-end PC hardware. This could present a challenge in maintaining good levels of temporal consistency, given the lower pixel counts.

For the PC version of the game, there are still improvements to be made. The cutscene frame-rate drops below 30fps ought to be investigated, more detailed settings could be useful, and the relatively few but still jarring frame-time issues during gameplay could and should be mopped up. Performance could also stand to be improved, but huge gains seem unlikely given the game’s nature. Still, Final Fantasy 16 is a stunning game on PC, and well worth checking out – though you might want to wait for a few extra patches before committing.