Square Enix’s fantasy road-trip saga, Final Fantasy XV, is finally coming to PC in March after its release on console over a year ago. To mark the occasion, Square Enix have released their benchmarking tool for the upcoming title, but you should really take this utility’s results with a grain of salt.
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If you’ve already tried out the benchmarking utility you may be wondering why your graphics card has been unable to keep up with the rest. Fear not, it’s likely not your GPU that is to blame but the strange selection of settings that Square Enix have decided to put into their restricted benchmarking suite.
Nvidia’s GameWorks features have made the final cut into the benchmarks ‘high quality’ setting. This means that any AMD-equipped machine is already going to be at a disadvantage during high-fidelity benchmarking runs thanks to the likes of HairWorks, Turf, and Flow effects. Not to mention that the benchmark is supposedly riddled with strange and inconsistent behaviours.
Throughout our benchmarks, AMD graphics cards suffered from serious artifacting, the likes of which you might expect from the heavy implementation of Nvidia’s proprietary tech. AMD’s scores are likely to increase as their drivers are updated for the title at a later date, however. Altogether, our AMD graphics card scores weren’t vastly inferior to their Nvidia counterpart despite the optimised technology, and both suffered from similar stuttering throughout all benchmark runs.
Interestingly, between the two CPUs we tested, the four-thread i5 7400 and eight-thread i7 6700K, we saw very little variation between the scores, indicating – at least within the confines of this benchmark – somewhat low reliance on top-tier CPUs for this title.
Square Enix have spoken through the Final Fantasy XV Twitter and Facebook accounts on the benchmark’s flaws and given clarification on the final game’s performance in relation to what we’ve seen so far of the PC port.
It seems FFXV’s benchmarking utility fulfils the purpose of a rendered teaser trailer, rather than a consistent or telling benchmark for performance – and should be treated as such. Square Enix are promising much more granularity within the settings once the game launches, which should allow for much smoother gaming experience and negate those pesky GameWorks settings for those who cannot afford the added hardware expense.