Final Fantasy XVI is scheduled to launch on PC, including Steam and Epic Games on the 17th of September (23 days from now). Square Enix has been kind enough to release a ~2-hour demo, and we spent most of our Saturday night putting it through its paces. The demo features less than a handful of locations, mostly linear, so take these numbers as preliminary. As usual, we tested the game on a GeForce RTX 4090 FE paired with a Ryzen 9 7950X and 32 GB (16 GB x2) of DDR5-6000 memory.
Final Fantasy XVI 4K Benchmarks: Low vs Mid vs High
Final Fantasy XVI doesn’t scale much across the three graphics presets, at least not in the burning castle where we tested it. We obtained averages of 54 FPS, 60 FPS, and 64 FPS at High, Mid, and Low, respectively. I suspect the game will show better scaling in a more open setting.
Although Final Fantasy XVI doesn’t feature ray tracing, it does come with multiple upscaling and frame generation technologies. These include DLSS 3, FSR 3, and XeSS. Upscaling, native anti-aliasing (DLAA), and frame generation are available on the first two, while the third features only upscaling.
DLSS upscaling propels the game to 106.4 FPS and 81 FPS at the “Performance” and “Quality” presets, respectively. DLAA (native AA) is a few frames slower, producing sharper image quality than the default TAA option.
Enabling frame generation boosts the framerates past 142 FPS, with the “Quality” and “Performance” presets averaging 126 FPS and 154 FPS, respectively. In comparison, the game averages 90 FPS and 118 FPS at 1440p and 1080p using the highest quality settings.
Final Fantasy XVI VRAM Usage & CPU Bottlenecks
Final Fantasy XVI uses over 8 GB of VRAM at 1080p “High” and 9 GB at 1440p “High.” Increasing the resolution to 4K increases the graphics memory consumption to ~10 GB. Changing the graphics settings doesn’t change the numbers much. I reckon this is also due to the indoor test environment.
Final Fantasy XVI remained GPU-bound throughout our test. It exhibited a GPU-Busy deviation of 0% at 1080p, indicating the complete absence of CPU bottlenecks.
Final Fantasy XVI is a decent-looking game with an okayish performance. We observed random framerate dips not expected on a high-end PC. Upscaling and frame generation suppress most performance drops, but this is just the demo. Hopefully, the main game will perform better in larger open-world environments.
