Want to know if you need to spend a few more Gil at Cid’s garage to upgrade your rig? You’ll want to download the Final Fantasy XV benchmark tool.
The Final Fantasy XV system requirements were revealed late last year, then were updated last month to include important additional information. That included install sizes, which are huge, and also target resolutions and setting levels for different systems.
If you found it a bit jumbled and confusing, that’s understandable. Handily, Square Enix also announced a benchmarking tool, to allow players to get a real-world flavour of whether their rig will support their largest RPG to date on its transition to Windows PC.
Today, the Final Fantasy XV benchmark tool is available to download from the Square Enix website, and it’s frankly a bit of a biggun. It’s 3.7GB.
To put that in a little context, the whole of No Man’s Sky – yes, the infinite universe one – is only about 6GB to download, and 10GB when unpacked and installed. The Final Fantasy XV benchmark tool runs for about six and a half minutes; No Man’s Sky has over 18 quintillion planets in one galaxy, and features (at least) 256 galaxies.
Yes, it has to include a bunch of 3D models, like a cross-section of the world, the Regalia, and Cindy’s inappropriate workplace attire. It also has to include all of the various textures up to the highest possible resolution of that’s 8K – yes, double that of 4K – to allow the test to be effective on all systems. Even so, that’s still huge.
It also shows that the Final Fantasy XV Windows Edition is going to push machines, really hard.
On a review laptop – check back for this one soon – running an Intel Core i7 7700HQ, a GTX 1070 with Max-Q design, and 16GB of RAM, we averaged around 50 frames per second in quieter sections, and 40 frames per second when things got busy, at the 1080p/high quality preset. It then punts you out onto a website to show how your benchmark ranks against other graphics cards:
Bump the Final Fantasy XV benchmark tool down to ‘standard’ quality on the same machine at the same resolution, and we’re getting a smooth 60 frames per second average for the majority of the benchmark, with occasional dips down to 48-52 frames per second when things get really busy.
It’s a similar story to the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X-enhanced versions of Final Fantasy XV, then. You can have 60 frames per second, or you can push higher detail levels, but you might struggle for both.
And don’t think you can get a head-start on the benchmark testing with your funky, multi-GPU setup; Nvidia SLI and AMD Crossfire aren’t supported by the tool. It’s not clear whether that limitation transfers over into the game proper, however.
