Final Fantasy 16 is very demanding on PC: here are the best settings

We received a lot of praise for Final Fantasy 16 when it arrived on PS5 last year, bringing excellent visuals with stable performance, at least at 30fps. The PC version has the potential to improve the visuals even further while also allowing for much better frame rates, and after a demo last month, the full version is finally here. After testing it, it’s clear that the PS5 version’s 60fps performance issues are a little more understandable, and there’s a lot more to say about the game’s technical implementation on PC.

In summary, the PS5 version can drop to 720p in performance mode, while still delivering frame rates well below 60fps, even 40fps in some cases. On PC, running at 1440p with DLSS and Dynamic Resolution Scaling (DRS) enabled on a mainstream-spec machine with a Ryzen 5 3600 and RTX 2070 Super, it was immediately obvious that the GPU load is heavy and can vary significantly from scene to scene. It was possible to see PS5-style frame rates in more demanding scenes, and it’s clear that the game has been designed around that 30fps refresh rate with DRS to smooth out the fluctuations in GPU load. The first recommendation is to use DRS on PC too, rather than a fixed high resolution, even with DLSS enabled.

The PC demo originally had some very variable frame-pacing, with frequent noticeable stutters in frame-time, but the final release improves on this. We saw around six or eight stutters in the first three hours of play, often in places where you wouldn't expect shader compilation to stutter. There were also periods of heavy GPU load, such as at the start or end of a scene, which caused the frame-rate to drop below the scene's 30fps cap, even when playing at an internal resolution of 360p. As such, on a lower-end rig, you may want to wait for further patches to hopefully address these issues.

On a high-end gaming PC with a Core i7 13700K and RTX 4090, these issues are less noticeable, and the game scales better than it could on PS5. At max settings with 4K DLAA or DLSS quality, you get a significantly cleaner 60fps presentation than the PS5, free of aliasing and tearing, allowing the already detailed graphics to shine. Some small frame rate drops are still possible, such as when there are a lot of alpha effects on screen, but such moments are few and far between.

You can also enable frame generation (DLSS or FSR) to increase frame rates at the expense of input lag. In-engine cutscenes remain capped at 30fps, presumably to match other pre-rendered 30fps cutscenes, with similar drops to the low-end system. Fortunately, there is a workaround: a tool called FF16Fix removes the cap on in-engine cutscenes and produces more stable results at 60fps or higher.

Objectively, this is probably one of the most GPU-intensive games we've seen this generation, despite not featuring ray tracing on consoles and upsampling technologies like DLSS and FSR being required to hit a solid 60fps, working in conjunction with dynamic resolution scaling. DRS seems very much a must-have, as we suspect the game's rendering budgets were built around it, something that won't easily please users in the PC space.

There are a few other oddities in the PC version. The game doesn't support any aspect ratio wider than 16:9, which is a shame for any modern game. Pre-rendered cutscenes are also presented at the input resolution, rather than the output resolution, with a clunky nearest-neighbor upscale on top, so presenting them at the output resolution with a bicubic or bilinear upscale if necessary would significantly improve their quality. Post-processing is also quite heavy, and its resolution is typically the internal resolution, so you can see more artifacts, such as depth-of-field flickering when using DLSS in performance mode. A more granular options menu that increased the resolution of these effects would be warranted.

Speaking of settings, there are a few options to play with here to balance fidelity and performance, and we started by trying to mimic the compromises made by the PS5's performance mode. The most important setting is DRS, as we've explained, but there are other settings that can also boost performance. For example, the setting labeled “graphics fidelity” changes the level of detail in the game, and here, medium offers a three percent increase in performance. Low is faster, but loses too much detail in our opinion. Likewise, shadow quality can be set to medium for a 6.5 percent boost in performance.

Other settings are generally less impactful in terms of performance and can be kept at a high setting. This includes texture quality, terrain detail, water quality, clutter density, and NPC quality. Screen space reflections (SSR), ambient occlusion (AO), and shader bloom can all be enabled, while variable rate shading can be disabled.

Ultimately, Final Fantasy 16 is pretty simple, with just a few knobs to tweak to optimize your hardware. More precise controls, like having quality levels for SSR and ambient occlusion instead of just on and off, would provide more meaningful choices for players. Right now, though, despite belittling the point, the use of dynamic resolution scaling is essential.

Before we wrap up, it’s worth speculating on how this game might run on PS5 Pro, given what we’ve learned from the PC version, even though the game isn’t currently listed as receiving PS5 Pro support. In short, it’s possible we’ll see PSSR upscaling used to get to 1440p, rather than 4K, given how demanding the game is even on high-end PC hardware. This could present a challenge in maintaining good levels of temporal coherence, given the lower pixel counts.

For the PC version of the game, there are still some improvements that could be made. The cutscene frame-rate drops below 30fps could be looked into, more detailed settings could be helpful, and the relatively few but still annoying frame-time issues during gameplay could and should be eliminated. Performance could also be improved, but huge gains seem unlikely given the nature of the game. Still, Final Fantasy 16 is a stunning game on PC and is well worth checking out, although you may want to wait for a few more patches before committing.