Square Enix Addresses GN's FFXV Benchmark Concerns in Statement

We recently published a deep-dive that discovered a lack of lower LOD scaling to HairWorks effects in FFXV, an issue we attributed to Square Enix and flagged to nVidia. We further noted that it wasn’t just GameWorks effects, but entire models were being drawn when miles away from the player. Following the report, Square Enix’s official FFXV twitter account (@FFXVEN) has released a series of tweets about the issue, noting: “A Level of Detail (LOD) issue has been discovered that affects the benchmark scores. The benchmark also suffers from stuttering; both of the issues will be addressed in the shipping game.”

We initially encountered the stuttering issues here, then again in our GPU benchmark, then in our deep-dive of the benchmark utility. In multiple published content pieces, we also noted that the lack of graphics settings for the benchmark tool was disappointing, to which the FFXV twitter account indirectly responded: “While the settings in the benchmark are largely pre-selected for simplicity’s sake, the final game will feature highly customizable settings with On/Off options for a wide variety of settings.”

FFXV’s account continued: “We wanted the benchmark tool to approximate the level of visual quality and performance you can expect from your PC environment when running Final Fantasy […] The benchmark will give you an idea of how beautiful the game will be upon release, but for the reasons stated above, the benchmark may not accurately reflect the game’s final performance.”

For now, it appears as if the issue of LOD scaling will be addressed for the final launch. Theses issues included rendering unseen objects (without GameWorks) and rendering incorrect LOD for HairWorks effects. As we stated in the original piece, we believed this to be an oversight, rather than malice, and attributed the issue to tight development timelines at Square Enix.

Learn more in the original report.