A few days earlier, Square Enix released their Final Fantasy XV Benchmark tool ahead of the game launch. The Final Fantasy XV PC benchmark tool enabled users to test out their computer setup and determine how well their computers can handle the game. Upon testing, however, the gaming community has pointed out several flaws in the benchmark which renders it unreliable.

Several Reddit users have posted their frustrations with the Final Fantasy XV PC Benchmark Tool saying that the benchmark tool is rendering load-intensive objects outside the camera frustum and resulting in lower reported performance metric. Frustum is the term that is used by developers to denote the region of space in the modeled world that may appear on the screen.

Steve Burke, a prominent video game critic, and computer hardware expert noted several reservations with the Final Fantasy XV PC Benchmark Tool in his recent article. In the article titled “FFXV’s Misleading Benchmark | Improper GameWorks Object Culling”, he has stated that the benchmark tool keeps on rendering objects that are not even in the Field of view of the camera hence resulting in lower performance.

He even went on to say that

“…the Final Fantasy XV benchmark is among the most misleading we’ve encountered in recent history”.

The most notable problems with Final Fantasy XV PC Benchmark Tool

Flawed implementation of Nvidia Hairworks

Nvidia’s Hairworks technology is used to make hair look very realistic on characters by detailing individual strands of hair. In the Final Fantasy XV PC Benchmark Tool, however, this technology works on characters even when they are not in Frustum causing lower performance. In his hours-long testing, Steve Burke noticed that even those characters who were miles away from the Frustum still rendered all their hair using the Hairworks technology. “We’d discovered that HairWorks toggling (on/off) had performance impact in areas where no hair existed.”, this only confirms the assertion that hair is being rendered in areas which are out of view from the camera.

Objects rendered out of bounds of the map

It is also reported that the Final Fantasy XV PC Benchmark Tool renders objects that are not even in the accessible part of the map. This again puts an unwanted load on the GPU causing lower frames per second.

Flawed implementation of Nvidia’s Turfworks technology

Besides the problems with Nvidia’s Hairworks tech, the grass in the Final Fantasy XV PC Benchmark Tool uses Nvidia’s Turfworks technology to detail each individual strand of grass for a more lifelike experience, although a welcome implementation, the grass, however, renders even when it is outside the camera viewing zone. This again takes a toll on performance causing frame drops.

As can be seen from the chart above, the game does evidently better when Gameworks settings are off. The lowest avg fps can be seen attributed to all Gameworks setting on at only 25.7 fps.

For the GTX 1070 above, the same results can be seen. With all GW settings off, the GPU does significantly better.

Although the Final Fantasy XV PC Benchmark Tool bore unreliable results, we still think it is early to tell how the actual game upon release would function. Much of the problems are expected to be fixed on game launch. For now, we can just wait for the game and hope these issues are addressed by the developers.

Price and Release Date

The game will be released on 6th March 2018, the same date as the Royal Edition and will be priced the same as the Royal Edition as well, at $49.99. You can check out more details on its Steam page.

How was your experience with the Final Fantasy XV PC Benchmark Tool? Let us know what you think down in the comments.

References: Benchmarks taken from the following website

www.gamersnexus.net/game-bench/3224-ffxv-disingenuous-misleading-benchmark-tool-gameworks-tests