Last week marked a significant milestone for Square Enix as it unveiled the highly anticipated Final Fantasy 16 for PC. This release, powered by an engine crafted by Creative Business Unit III, invites gamers to explore its performance capabilities across a range of hardware configurations.
Performance Benchmarks
In our benchmarking endeavors, we utilized an impressive setup featuring an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D paired with 32GB of DDR5 RAM operating at 6000MHz. Our graphics card lineup included AMD’s Radeon RX580, RX Vega 64, RX 6900XT, and RX 7900XTX, alongside NVIDIA’s GTX980Ti, RTX 2080Ti, RTX 3080, and RTX 4090. The tests were conducted on a Windows 10 64-bit system using the GeForce 561.09 and Radeon Adrenalin Edition 24.20.11.01 drivers, with the second CCD on the 7950X3D disabled.
Square Enix has thoughtfully included a variety of graphics settings for PC gamers to customize their experience. Players can adjust settings such as Textures, Terrain, Shadows, Water, Clutter Density, and NPC Quantity. Additional options include Screen Space Reflections, Ambient Occlusion, Bloom, Variable Rate Shading, Motion Blur, and Chromatic Aberration. The game also supports advanced upscaling technologies like NVIDIA DLSS 3, AMD FSR 3.0, and Intel XeSS.
Notably, Final Fantasy XVI lacks a built-in benchmarking tool, prompting us to use the first Titan fight and the garden/palace area for our tests—locations recognized for their demanding graphical requirements. For CPU benchmarks, we lowered the resolution to 1080p and employed DLSS 3 Ultra Performance, excluding Frame Generation to mitigate any potential GPU bottlenecks.
In our quest to evaluate the game’s performance across various CPU configurations, we simulated dual-core, quad-core, and hexa-core systems. Interestingly, our dual-core setup without SMT struggled to run the game, experiencing stutters lasting up to 13 seconds. However, enabling SMT resulted in consistently high framerates exceeding 60fps.
FFXVI is capable of utilizing up to sixteen CPU threads, showcasing exceptional CPU scaling. This title stands out as one that can effectively leverage multiple cores and threads, while still performing admirably on CPUs with as few as four cores. Square Enix has addressed many of the stuttering issues that affected the demo version, although minor traversal stutters may still occur, generally going unnoticed by most players.
While a high-end CPU is not a prerequisite for this game, a robust GPU is essential. At native 1080p with maximum settings, players will need a GPU comparable to the NVIDIA RTX 3080 to maintain framerates above 60fps. For those aiming for native 1440p at maximum settings, only the AMD Radeon RX 7900XTX and NVIDIA RTX 4090 managed to exceed 60fps. As for native 4K at maximum settings, no current GPU can deliver a consistent 60fps experience.
Interestingly, the in-game settings do not yield substantial performance improvements, with only a 14-19% boost observed when adjusting from maximum to low settings. The most significant performance enhancement occurs at the lowest settings, primarily due to the disabling of SSR and AO.
On a positive note, Final Fantasy 16 is visually stunning. Initially released on PS5 as one of its most impressive titles, the PC version elevates the experience further. Characters are rendered with remarkable detail, and the environments are lush and immersive.
