Last week, Square Enix released Final Fantasy 16 for PC. Powered by an engine developed by Creative Business Unit III, it's now time to compare it and examine its performance on PC.
For our benchmarks, we used an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 32GB DDR5 at 6000MHz, AMD's Radeon RX580, RX Vega 64, RX 6900XT, RX 7900XTX, NVIDIA's GTX980Ti, RTX 2080Ti, RTX 3080, and RTX 4090. We also used Windows 10 64-bit, the GeForce 561.09, and the Radeon Adrenalin Edition 24.20.11.01 drivers. In addition, we disabled the second CCD on our 7950X3D.
Square Enix has added some graphics settings to tweak. PC players can adjust the quality of textures, terrain, shadows, water, clutter density, and NPC quantity. There are also options for Screen Space Reflections, Ambient Occlusion, Bloom, Variable Rate Shading, Motion Blur, and Chromatic Aberration. The game also supports NVIDIA DLSS 3, AMD FSR 3.0, and Intel XeSS. Our benchmarks and comparisons for these PC upscaling technologies can be found here.
Final Fantasy XVI does not have a built-in benchmark tool, so we used the first Titan battle and the Garden/Palace area for our testing. These areas seem to be some of the most demanding locations, so we will also be using these areas for our upcoming PC performance analysis.
For our CPU benchmarks, we reduced the resolution to 1080p and used DLSS 3 Ultra Performance (but no frame generation) to eliminate any potential GPU bottlenecks.
To see how the game runs with different CPU types, we simulated dual-core, quad-core, and hexa-core CPUs. Without SMT, our simulated dual-core system was unable to run the game. Believe it or not, we saw stuttering that could last for 13 seconds. I've never experienced anything like it. Thankfully, with SMT enabled, we were able to achieve frame rates above 60 frames per second at all times.
It's also worth noting that FFXVI can use up to sixteen CPU threads. The CPU scaling is exceptional. This is one of those rare games that can benefit from a lot of CPU cores/threads. And yet it can run well even on CPUs with only 4 cores. Square Enix has also fixed most of the stuttering that plagued the demo version. There are a few minor stutters here and there as you run through. Most of you won't even notice them, though.
Although the game doesn't require a high-end CPU, it definitely requires a powerful GPU. At native 1080p/Max settings, you'll need a GPU equivalent to the NVIDIA RTX3080 to hit over 60 fps.
At native 1440p/Max settings, only our AMD Radeon RX 7900XTX and NVIDIA RTX4090 were able to achieve frame rates above 60 fps. And as for native 4K/Max settings, there is no GPU that can deliver a 60 fps experience.
Unfortunately, the in-game settings seem a bit pointless as they don't provide huge performance improvements. From Max to Low, we only saw a 14-19% performance increase. At the lowest settings, we saw a noticeable performance improvement, but that's because you disable SSR and AO.
Final Fantasy 16 looks great. When it came out on PS5, it was one of the best looking games, even though it didn't use ray tracing. And now the game looks even better on PC. The characters are very detailed and most of the environments look great. I'm sure some will find places where the game looks subpar. So, news to everyone. Almost every game has areas where it can look average. FFXVI looks great for the most part. Yes, it has ridiculously high GPU requirements and there's definitely room for improvement here. But let's not pretend the game looks bad or anything.
All in all, Final Fantasy 16 doesn't require a high-end CPU, but it does require a high-end GPU. It's a shame that you can't improve performance through the game settings (except for using Dynamic Resolution or any of the available upscaling techniques). Still, this is a beautiful game. On top of that, it natively supports HDR. With it enabled, FFXVI can look even better (without looking washed out or anything like that). Square Enix has also fixed most of the stuttering issues.
As we said, the game could benefit from some optimizations and QoL improvements. For example, there is no FOV slider. Also, the cutscenes are capped at 30fps. And unfortunately, there is no support for ultrawide PC monitors. The good news is that there is a mod that fixes all of these issues. FFXVIFix is a must-have mod that will greatly improve your gaming experience, so be sure to download it.
Enjoy!
John is the founder and editor-in-chief of DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fanatic and is a huge supporter of the modding and indie communities. Before founding DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. Although he is a diehard PC gamer, his gaming roots lie on consoles. John loved – and still loves – the 16-bit consoles and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. However, the PC platform won him over consoles. This was mainly due to 3DFX and its legendary dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on “The Evolution of PC Graphics Cards”.
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