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Square Enix said that Final Fantasy 16 was going to have a Performance Mode, but that doesn’t automatically guarantee it’ll perform well. Certain outlets have now released technical breakdowns of the game and demonstrated how the RPG runs in practice.
Final Fantasy 16’s two modes are quite different
According to Digital Foundry, both the Quality Mode and Performance Mode have aggressive dynamic resolution scaling. Quality Mode typically bounces between 1080p and 1440p and is then spatially upscaled to 4K. It also runs at a pretty solid 30 frames per second most of the time, according to multiple tests (cutscenes run at 30 no matter the mode). Digital Foundry’s John Linneman noted that Quality Mode was the suggested way to play because of its consistency and said that he assumed this is how Square Enix wants players to experience the game.
This is partially because Linneman’s tests found Performance Mode to be rather uneven. It tops out at about 1080p, but is often a lot lower and can hover around 720p. It uses some effects like temporal anti-aliasing to reduce shimmering, but he said the drops were noticeable. Linneman also called out the reduction in shadow quality, increased pop-in, and “swirling circles” that are distracting.
He went on to explain that these visual compromises don’t even get Final Fantasy 16 to a solid 60 frames per second. It constantly dips below that when exploring, but strangely nearly locks to 60 when combat starts up. He posited that the game drops the resolution “like a rock” to make sure combat is at least smooth.
Its load times, however, were found to be incredibly short. Most are just a few seconds and booting into a save from the PS5’s dashboard takes less than 10 seconds, according to one of the tests in the video.
Square Enix has already committed to improving the game’s performance and even said it will let players disable motion blur in an upcoming update.