Final Fantasy XV is a demanding but scalable game on PC

Final Fantasy XV is heading to PC officially next week but we've managed to get a quick look at performance ahead of time thanks to the release of a free playable demo. The game's initial benchmark release didn't turn out to be all that useful, but the demo version of the game comes with useful stat tools to measure performance and from what I've played so far, it is a demanding game.

Given that Final Fantasy XV is a heavily detailed open world game, it will take a toll on performance. I played through the first portion of the game on a system featuring an Intel Core i7-8700K, 16GB of RAM and a GTX 1080Ti at 3440×1440 resolution. With this set up, I was getting around 80 frames per second on roads and at the Hammerhead gas station on the game's highest settings. However, venturing out into the wilderness brought dips down into the 50 frames per second range. The wilderness in the PC version has a much denser amount of foliage, and this seems to be the root cause of the frame rate drops, so I'd recommend turning that down if you want to stay above 60 frames per second. It has a similar effect to driving in the hills of GTA V with all of the grass details cranked up.

The game's graphics menu options are comprehensive and the game does come with native 21:9 ultrawide support, which is great news. You can't navigate the menus with a mouse, which is a shame but the actual in-game keyboard/mouse controls are perfectly playable. You won't be forced to use a controller, which is a nice change for a Japanese console game making its way to PC.

Text doesn't seem to render at full resolution, so it did appear somewhat blocky. This is particularly noticeable when you receive new quests or complete them, so hopefully this is something that will be patched in the final game.

I haven't had the chance to try the game out on other GPU setups or at other resolutions, but my initial impressions are pretty good. The graphics are very good and at the highest settings, the game is demanding. However, it seems very scalable, so knocking things down a bit or disabling the Nvidia-specific graphics options should help a great deal.

KitGuru Says: Have many of you tried out the Final Fantasy XV PC demo yet? What sort of performance are you getting on your rig?

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