FFXV’s Playable Demo Addresses Settings Concerns with Customization

Following Final Fantasy XV’s benchmark launch, which we found to be flawed in a few ways, Square Enix has now launched its playable demo for the first portion of the game. This is the first time that FFXV has been playable on PC, barring some flukes in the benchmark, and is also the first revisit to the game since the benchmark’s launch.

Our primary concerns with the benchmark tool were validated by Square Enix, who noted they’d be addressing the concerns. The primary issue was that no graphics customization options were present without exposing the game’s .ini files via .dlls, which we did, and we later found the other issue: Some objects were being drawn at high LOD when never appearing on screen, something we validated with inspection tools. This included non-GameWorks objects and GameWorks objects, with the latter impacting performance more heavily on both AMD and nVidia devices.

As we ramp into validation of our findings from the benchmark, we wanted to publish some preliminary information on the game’s new settings customization options that have been exposed. Please find the screenshots of each settings preset below:

The original benchmark only had "lite," "standard," and "high" options. This has now been diversified into: Low, Average, High, Highest, and Custom. "High" now disables GameWorks features, while Highest enables them. Standard and Low modify the non-GameWorks settings. Turf is also now off by default on even the Highest setting.

This inspires some confidence that Square took the criticism seriously, and that we may yet expect a PC launch with fixes for the overdraw issues encountered in the benchmark. It further reinforces that the initial benchmark tool is likely an inadequate utility for determining real PC performance in the final game.

For now, it looks like options have been added, so that’s certainly a good thing.

Editorial: Steve Burke