Final Fantasy XV - Graphics & Optimisations

Final Fantasy XV remains a personal, heartfelt favourite of mine. I am still finding so much joy across Console and PC, and I wanted to ensure everybody else has the best opportunity to enjoy this game to the fullest.

For PC gamers, graphics are the juiciest, but most troublesome settings...
With this guide, the goal is not to achieve Ultra Graphical Fidelity where you can see Noctis' pores & sweat;
These graphical settings aim to achieve a smooth experience, while preserving the intended art style.

These graphics settings are either from my own extensive comparisons, or are a compilation from other sources, but this guide aims to be a loose assistance to hopefully support you on your adventure~!

If you are happy with the settings above, you don't need to read fruther.
Everything below here goes into further and greater detail for the choices made, and what each setting does.

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FPS (Frames Per Second) determines what frame rate the game will run at, limiting it's maximum FPS.
The higher the FPS, the smoother the visual experience will be, at the expense of having to render more frames.
The lower the FPS, the less frames your GPU has to render, and can focus on other tasks, prioritising a more stable experience.

The maximum frame rate your game will show, will depend on what monitor you have.
If you do not see 120FPS or 144FPS, you may have a lower refresh rate monitor not capable of these speeds.

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Resolution (Supersampling) does not refer to the display resolution, but the render resolution. Your graphics card will render the game at this specified resolution, then resize the image to fit your display resolution.
The higher you set it, the sharper, crisper, cleaner details & textures will be, with setting it lower having the opposite effect.

If you set it high, this can be a massive resource drain. If you set it lower, it will save a lot of processing power, at the expense of quality.

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To first configure the graphics options, you must select custom. However, if you do not want to configure all of these options, then selecting a preset can be very useful and helpful!

Originally posted by Digital Trends:

Each preset is so well-tuned, we couldn’t improve on them.

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Available as a 66GB download of Downloadable Content (DLC), Assets replaces almost every texture in the game, replaces foliage, and includes 4K versions of all rendered cutscenes, for English and Japanese.

Assets is all about user choice. It's a huge download, and doesn't just improve the quality of textures, but changes the art style of many.

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Model LOD (Level Of Detail) uses a lot of CPU resources. It directly effects the draw distance of most objects (trees, rocks, and grass, etc.) in the game.

The higher Model LOD is set, the distance objects will be rendered in the distance will increase.
The lower Model LOD is set, the distance objects will be rendered in the distance will decrease.

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TRAM (Texture RAM) directly effects the quality of the textures by allocating more or less memory to texture capacity/quality. The higher TRAM is set, the better the textures will look, but at a significant performance loss.

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Anisotropic Filtering enhances the quality and clarity of textures on surfaces like floors, increasing the clarity of distant surfaces.

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Geomapping adds tessellation to landscapes/natural textures.
Across many surfaces, the visual differences are minimal. The most notable change/improvement will be on beaches, with the sand having significantly better depth and definition.

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Lighting in Final Fantasy XV doesn't change much across different settings.
However, when set to low, Screen Space Reflections are disabled across surfaces like water, and the Regalia.

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Spending so much time in nature, shadows are cast everywhere and are incredibly immersive in Final Fantasy XV.
Higher settings merely increase the sharpness & clarity of shadows, where lower settings soften the shadows.

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Ambient Occlusion adds smaller shadows around the world to assets and items, providing greater "depth" to the world, making it look far more natural and realistic.

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Anti-aliasing smooths the jagged appearance of many objects and assets of Final Fantasy XV, and also the blending between some objects and terrain.

FXAA is a low performance option, smoothing out a lot, without a huge performance loss, but not as good looking as TAA.
TAA (Temporal Anti-Aliasing) is a higher performance option, providing the best smoothing, but at the expense of more performance loss.

TAA can cause the game to appear blurry when playing at lower resolutions. (1080p or below)

Originally posted by Digital Foundry:

A lot of the visual elements were designed with this feature in mind, such as the hair. At a lower resolution, TAA can look somewhat unsatisfactory and blurry. However, playing at higher resolutions, TAA works even better.

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Motion Blur seemingly is mostly effective during fights & battles, and less visible during free roaming movements & camera movement.

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Filtering (Post-Processing?) applies a sort of hazy blur to the game, reducing clarity and quality.

The implementation of NVIDIA Graphics Features is arguably not great.
The performance penalty to enable certain features can be unpredictable.

These settings are all about user preference.
For NVIDIA Graphics settings, especiallyTurfEffects and ShadowLibs settings, I think this is a similar situation to Assets, where it's entirely up to the user.

HairWorks does not change the characters' hair, only on some of the larger animals & beasts.
While the implementation introduces more style, depth, and physics to the fur, it can come with a performance decrease when enabled, with it worsening depending on how many creatures are on screen.

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NVIDIA VXAO is most visible and appreciated when inside interiors, greatly improving the interiors, but outside environments see little improvement from this, while it can be a massive performance penalty in gameplay and cutscenes.

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TurfEffects is both a CPU and GPU intensive option, replacing the games standard foliage with NVIDIA's own.

NVIDIA has shown TurfEffects technology to deform and move around characters, but in Final Fantasy XV, this is not entirely the case.

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NVIDIA ShadowLibs introduces lots of more subtle shadows, most notably among the characters.

SteamDeck Optimisations are in-progress. These are the currently deployed settings, and may change.

Final Fantasy XV on the SteamDeck can be enjoyable, but not without some sacrifice.
If the developers still existed, I'm sure they would make further optimisations, but alas, we have to figure it out for ourselves!

Our biggest enemy? The battery! Final Fantasy XV is a battery drainer.
With the settings below, at a 50% charge, 2 hours of playtime could be expected!

Steam Deck Performance Settings:
Per-game Profile: On
Frame Limit: 30 FPS
TDP Limit: 12 Watts
GPU Clock: 1200 MHz

Ingame Settings:
Framerate: 30FPS
Resolution: 125%
Preset: Low
NVIDIA Features: Off

Strangely, locking the Screen Refresh Rate & In-Game FPS to 30fps looks smoother than only locking the In-Game FPS to 30fps...

coming soon

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2094194252 https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2722527988 https://store.steampowered.com/app/771560/

Final Fantasy XV can be troublesome to optimise, but I hope you find a rewarding experience in this adventure.