Final Fantasy XV PC Report: An impressive job, but not perfect

Almost a year and a half after its console launch, Final Fantasy XV finally makes its way to the PC to much celebration by Final Fantasy fanatics like me. I’m also a PC fanatic, so it’s a win-win situation for me. I have a long history with Final Fantasy games that traces back 15 years, but this is the first time I’m using the PC as a platform to witness the franchise.

Square Enix has a good reputation when it comes to PC ports, their most recent one being the excellent Chrono Trigger, which was received well by the community. This, plus the build up and delays leading to the release of Final Fantasy XV Windows Edition, have raised my expectations fairly. Final Fantasy XV is available on Steam, Windows 10 Store and Origin. A non-EA game on Origin you wonder? Well, Final Fantasy XV is kind of like a PC gaming poster child.

OK, enough with the ceremonial introductions. Let’s get started with the task in hand. I received a Steam code from the folks at Nvidia. Initially, I was taken aback with the massive 85 GB download size of the game, and this is without the high-resolution texture pack, which adds an additional 70 GB of data. This might put off some gamers, considering their “Fair Usage Policy” by Internet Service Providers. Also, this might be problematic for gamers looking to install this on their SSDs, which I would recommend. Loading times are faster and FPS is better by 2-3 frames too.

The minimum and recommended specifications of Final Fantasy XV Windows Edition are:

Here the specifications of my system:

CPU: Intel Core i7 6600K @ 4.00Ghz
GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition
Memory: 16GB DDR4 RAM

After a wait of a couple of hours for the download to finish, I immediately launched the game, owing to my genuine excitement of it. I hit the Graphics Setting page and my oh my, theres a whole lotta settings to fiddle with. The game natively supports GSYNC and 120 fps, which was great because my monitor has those features. I set the resolution to my monitor’s native resolution, 2540 x 1440 pixels. All settings were maxed out, and NVIDIA’s exclusive settings were enabled.

At these settings, the game looked stunning in every sense. Much, much better than the consoles. The character models, the beasts, the scenery, everything. Details were sharp, textures and character models were brilliant. This is one sweet looking game. The major caveat that I experienced at these settings was that I was only getting 30-40 FPS. I disabled NVIDIA HairWorks (from Rise of Tomb Raider, remember?) and TurfEffects, and the game immediately gained some 20 frames per second. I don’t think there is a PC that can handle all these settings and still deliver a solid 60 FPS, yet. In places with small rooms, like the tutorial area, I got 120 FPS. But in the open world, I was not even getting 60.

To manage a frame rate of above 100 FPS, I had to turn the Preset to “High”, with all the NVIDIA settings off. In this mode, the game consistently ran above 100 fps, barring a few hiccups, especially when getting on and off the car, and during excessive particle effects in fights.

I started playing around with the graphics settings more. We have to give it to Square Enix over here, for giving us tons of options to play around with, all having considerate impact on the the game looks and performs. I dwelled in, and now I aimed for a stable 100 fps in the “Highest” preset. I changed the Shadows preset from “Highest” to “High”, and changed the Anti-aliasing method from TAA to FXAA. This gave me an average FPS of 90, rather than a 100. The difference is negligible, and it is an absolute joy to play the game at this setting.

The game comes with a plethora of PC exclusive features, starting with native 4K support, which we couldn’t test due to the lack of a 4K screen. Then, there’s an Advanced In-Game Photo Mode that uses NVIDIA Ansel. This feature allows you to compose screenshots from any position, adjust them with post-process filters, capture HDR images in high-fidelity formats, and share them in 360 degrees using your mobile phone, PC, or VR headset. The game demonstrates this really well through one of the 4 main characters, and this feature works just as advertised. It’s fun playing around with screenies!

NVIDIA HairWorks uses DirectX 11 tessellation to enhance the visual appearance of hair and fur in the game’s main character and monsters. This feature is also compatible with AMD GPUs. Enabling it gave me a hit of around 10 frames per second. VXAO (Voxel Ambient Occlusion) is another setting in the Graphics menu. In this setting, occlusion and lighting information is gathered from a world space voxel represenation of a scene, which takes into account a large area around the viewer. The result is scene-wide Ambient Occlusion shadowing, instead of “screen space” shadowing used by other techniques that merely render AO shadows based on what you the player can currently see. Enabling VXAO gave me yet another hit of 10-15 fps.

You also get support for NVIDIA ShadowPlay and ShadowPlay Highlights. The game automatically records key gameplay moments and achievements, such as defeating a boss or summoning a God.

The game is quick to point out that it is natively designed for the controller. I tried the game with both the DualShock 4 controller and the Xbox One controller, both ran perfectly. When switching from the controller to the keyboard, the game updates its control icons immediately. Even the keyboard and mouse work good, but not great. Controls were responsive throughout, still, I couldn’t help but notice that the game is built around the use of a controller. Juggling through the menus with the keyboard and mouse is a pain. Performing some actions, like special moves of one of your team mates, is complicated, whereas with a controller it involves the simple push of a button.

There are a few nagging annoyances with Final Fantasy XV Windows Edition. The game cannot handle alt-tabbing, and enters into fullscreen mode when triggered. The online forums have a workaround for it, that’s if you’re willing to dwell into the ini files.

Anyway, if I make it through the 100 hours of gameplay this game requires, I will post a review of the story and gameplay. So far, this is all the justice I can do to critique this game. About the PC port of Final Fantasy XV, I’m happy with the way it works. It is very modular and you can play around with a lot of settings, this makes this a very scalable game for all PCs that are above the minimum requirements bar. The game look gorgeous and runs fantastic. Minus a few hiccups, like a large download size and squeaky keyboard and mouse controls, Square Enix again gets the credit of making a great Final Fantasy PC port.

Our Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 was supplied to us by the generous folks at NVIDIA India.