Final Fantasy 16 PC Demo Reaction: There Are Some Problems... 

The game does load unbelievably fast on PC. So, the direct storage thing seems to be working.

Using an older gpu is a realistic move, good job on that, its part of what I like about this channel.

Someone on steam released a fix for uncapping cut scenes.

Some of the textures look incredibly blurry (especially the rocks), but overall, Im definitely buying!

Another issue, which I haven't noticed anyone mention, is that several character's hair models don't seem to load the correct LOD level regardless of quality setting, specifically Biast, Adult Clive, Joshua and Elwin are noticeably lower quality than their PS5 counterparts, when viewed up close, in my demo and several streams I have seen.

With the amount of time they've had to work on this, anything less than being perfectly smooth on launch is unacceptable

We need PC 2 Asap lol

I'm surprised no one's talking about the 170GB space required? That's insane.

30 FPS locked cutscenes in 2024 is a crime

Oliemack. I don't know much about PC configurations, but I noticed that the images looked very blurry with DLAA and I tried FSR Native and it completely improved. This is the first game I play with FSR because in any configuration it looks better than with DLSS. Greetings.

Before i hear the rest of why some of this still looks aliased, is i think some of these cut scenes are not in game, which is also why they are at 30 fps. I saw my gpu not being used much during some cutscenes which indicates, video.

for me every cutscene cut was "ok i'm having problem or what? oh ok no it's a cutscene" i was going from 120 fps to 30. a disaster. Plus come on 21:9 not supported in 2024. PLS GUYS PLS.

I dont mind the Demo not playing well (even tho i'd rather see it run well from Day 1) but the issue is SE is not patching their games up on PC and never did, them saying they will make the performance better means nothing to me when all of their PC ports of modern games are half assed. Kingdom Hearts didn't see updates, FF7R didn't see it, FF15 is just dead (i know its old but damn that game needs DLSS 2.0 and some fixes even now) and now with FF16 being ass doesn't really make me want to buy their modern games on PC. Also i have horrible stutter too on my build. Running on a Ryzen 7800X3D with 32 GB which i dont think its the issue, but my GPU is an RTX 3060 Ti. The VRAM usage is almost capping 8 GB and whatever the resolution the usage is same + same stutter whatever im doing. I'd be ok with 30 FPS too but since the stutter is huge, capping to 30 ain't helping it.

I feel like the patch improved the picture quality tho

Naoki Yoshida and his team are used to ask to they players and listen to the community pretty close. They come from FF14 the actual BEST MMOrpg we have these days. So FF16 is for me a love letter to all who REALLY enjoys FF franchise.

On my RTX 4050 laptop I use 30 fps cap even in gameplay, the game is rock solid. With frame gen the game runs at about 70/80 fps with high preset but there are some micro-freezes that ruin the experience, maybe because I only have 16 gb of RAM and not dual channel. It's also a strange blurry game, like FFXV, and It's not a problem of dynamic resolution, It's blurry, that's all. Anyway, the story is very interesting and I'm curious about It. Edit: 30 FPS on My 60hz TV, while on my 144hz monitor the game suggests to use the 36 FPS cap.

I have an R5 5600 and an RX 6600 and I definitely need to use FSR to do anything. It's not ideal but I guess it's better than nothing.

Thank you for covering this game!

1:25 The scene of negotiation in the fortress is pre-rendered FMV. The aliasing you see is the video playback try to look crisp on 4K resolution. This game has many hidden FMV that looks just like in-engine. And that's why they keep the cutscenes 30fps locks. The FMV are always 30fps no matter what. The real time cutscenes (and the photo mode) also dynamically increase the internal resolution to improve the quality to fit the 30fps goal and help to hide the seam to the FMV. How did I know? There's the fps unlock mod available already. And it unlock all the real time cutscenes. But it can do nothing about the FMV. Usually, the FMV are the scene where it used only once and not used during actual gameplay. And some situation with a lot of people. You could also take a closer look at the hair alpha which the real time one would looks noisy from the alpha hash style blending under the AA while the FMV looks more smooth as if it has much more sample. And also FMVs will look exactly the same to every noise dots or aliasing with the PS5. That's another way to check. PC with different super resolution options will have a different aliasing. *additional edit after watch it all* I observe a few situation of fps drops that's visible to the eyes. -When they swap the real time and FMV. This one I clearly notice when I use the fps unlock mod and look at the number. It's a little bit stuttering when it change to and from 30. It's not a smooth transition. -When the scene is actually heavy like the fireworks of particles. This is the easiest one to observe. -When the dynamic resolution try to swap the internal resolution. I discover this as I try to eliminate the stuttering at the beginning cutscene of the Eikonic Challenge which is a real time cutscene and just fade out of black at the very beginning and it just stuttering about two times. Maybe it's the same as your machine gun stuttering in the background but that's all my bare eyes can pick up. So I try many options like turning everything low and such. And I found out that turn off the dynamic resolution eliminate that one specific stuttering. That's what I can say for sure. But I assume there could be a lot more of the situations that it does this again. But there also be the problem as I turn the dynamic resolution off and set a upscaling quality to a well balance one that give a constant fps over 30 which I limit and use frame generation to 60 so it's buttery smooth and also looks quite nice in almost all the time. But without the dynamic resolution, the particle fest will kill the performance. So I think I have to choose between stuttering from time to time or fps drop on heavy situation. Maybe with yours's monitoring tools could get more conclude answer than me.

Capping in game framerate to 60fps with DLSS frame-gen on (screen framrate set to 120hz in game) was the only way I could get a steady 120fps without broad fluctuations (78 to 120) Ollie is right - DLAA seemed to help this title quite a bit so I changed the screen framerate setting to 100hz. This also ran smoother and looked more visually consistent compared to leaving the fps uncapped with frameg-gen.(Surpised framegen looks so smooth....little to no artifacting!) This is also another one of those titles where framegen creates severe tearing so I had to force the Nvidia Control Panel Vsync for this application.

I bet the stuttering is asset streaming - it seems to persist on the very low resolution. If it the combat is 60fps I'll be happy.

Someone please tell me what's the best PC for this game. I know nothing regarding Graphic card. But I've been waiting for this game PC release for 1 year. If someone can leave me a link of what to buy or where to buy a whole PC that can run this game 4k 60fps. I would really appreciate it 🙏🏾

Besides the 30 fps cutscenes, it looked and played pretty great to me. Although I’m playing on a TV many feet away and with a very powerful system (4080, 7800x3d), so that might have something to do with it! It was so great to play that game not stuck at 30 fps during gameplay (« performance » mode on PS5 was atrocious).

Pre-rendered cutscenes locked at 30 FPS is a plague that needs to stop already. Fortunately a mod unlocks them.

I also found that the graphic quality seems not really at the level that we set e.g: Ultra or High Preset...like not HD enough or detail enough👀

The demo dropped from 60 fps to 30 and even 10 on the bridge before Benedictor's fight, and then came back. Must be some technical issue

The demo also shipped with the incorrect dlss3 frame gen dll file which caused my system to crash when enabling frame gen, had to fix it myself manually, idk if they fixed it yet but I did see an update to the demo, seems there are many dll files that where outdated

I had an issue while deciding if to keep frame generation on or off, the game clearly went to like 2/3rds of the design speed and I wasn’t able to keep 60 fps in game, nor 30 in cutscenes. Only a game restart restored the correct execution, so I fear that playing with settings too much can just break the game.

I mean it's a demo so things will be improved when the final retail release comes out. Maybe by then the PS5 Pro will be a thing and they'll push out a PS5 Pro patch .

Textures looking low quality may be a VRAM limitation. Hardware Unboxed has shown that many new games when they max out your GPU's VRAM will now dynamically lower texture quality just to keep it from going to system memory.

As another comment said, i wouldnt enable frame gen. I have a 4080s + 7800X3D and my game crashed instanly after enabling. Its a pain to fix that stuff so dont even bother as of now. Maybe they'll update it. Pretty sad they have to update a demo tho

1:20 I'm pretty sure that whole sequence is just a pre-rendered video

30fps on cutscenes is ok, but with those horrid frametimes, definitely not. 60fps with bad frametimes would've been bad too

I wonder if devs fail to address frame rate and texture issues not only because there's just not enough time to address all issues but because they assume community members will make their own patches and fixes and mods for their own specific needs?

SE have committed to more of their of their franchises, including FF coming to Xbox & PC day 1, so I'm kinda curious if we'll see improved PC builds of their software & what titles from their back catalogue could arrive on both platforms, especially when XSX is lacking a bunch of the recent releases that PS5 & PC both possess.

Was it 1.00 or 1.01 patch, because they fixed blurry textures with dlss with this patch and stuttering was reduced significantly

I know that rtx 2070s is like rtx 3060, but try to use 3060 12gb, is the most used gpu right now in steam

Strange thing is I played the demo on gtx 1070 and only at the first 20 seconds I had issues. It ran fine.

I pre ordered it already, it's amazing

Talk about the issue with processors without AVX2, like Intel of 3th and 4th generations, that simply don't run

PS3 - FFXIII: Hair Aliasing; PS4 - FFVII Remake: Hair Aliasing; PS5 - FFXVI: Hair Aliasing; PS6 - Final Hair: (problem solved).

They should’ve increased the cutscene fps for high end pc rig but they stayed 30 fps all throughout

Over 100 hours i give FF16 on PS5. And when i downloaded the demo for my PC and run with RX 7900XT and Ryzen 7 7800X3D, omg... I wish the 100 hours spend on PC not on PS5 gameplay. Just PC graphics is with Frame Gen, FSR 3 and everything is way more advance than PS5.

Essentially, the PC version is basically just the PS5 game ported. Its not really taking advantage of the PC. So it going to look and run the same on the PS5 Pro.

The detail differences are nice to have for qol to have a best version of the game going forward, but its also getting to the point of - does anyone really care, does it practically make any difference to the experience any more? Performance is arguably more important

No doubt a PS5 Pro upgrade will come too

denuvo prolly fcking up this games performance

Did you use Reshade with the PC version though? Reshade and PC gaming go hand in hand. Also, a friend of mine did comparison of his console games to my PC and it has always been a night and day difference. He is a PC gamer now account of it. Which, people saying not that far from each other type of talks console to PC= Not honest. Like people pushing cheap affordable cars to expensive ones and tell people they are close to each other talks = Not Honest. They widdle down this and that to the point making a person feel better for owning what is cheap = That is what Console talk to PC does. A bad on purpose port however, can take away the capabilities of the PC. For love for PC on purpose is not their by the devs or don't want to put in the effort.

Shows what an amazing machine the PS5 is. You literally can't even spot the difference from this RU-vid video. Having a 4000 dollar PC just for gaming is a complete waste of money. The PS5 Pro is more than likely to give similar results as your high end PC here, for a fraction of the price.

For this game, only FSR upscale look sharp images ,DLSS look blurry

Wondering how much Denuvo will fuck up the final launch

I don’t know what folks were expecting. The game already looked pretty good on the PS5 but optimization was already an issue. It had no business being a 30 fps game even looking as good as it did.

I think a more fair comparison would be on a cost equivalent built PC ($400). Otherwise its superiority seems reliant on the depth of your wallet.

Square sucks at PC ports. That's been obvious since FFVII Remake.

Im playing on steam deck and its abysmal. I need some help with the settings. Im coming straight from console with no pc experience. Help me Please!

Bit of ghosting for me even over 60 fps, kinda disappointed.

The demo is awesome, but this is the first game I've had to play on low to get 60ps (2070s). Luckily the game still looks great.

Cutscenes aside, the whole game ran smooth for me. Actually made me regret buying it early on PS5.

Yeah ill be waiting for rebirth....

I can get a solid 60 but 120 nope certainly not a solid 120 but at times it’s close. Granted I’ll be happy with any FPS over 60 being a console convert but it’s not consistent at all. Graphics settings mid to high also I can’t see much of a difference. 30 FPS cutscenes locked strangely does NOT bother my eyes but going from those to suddenly higher framerates yea it’s a tad jarring. I wonder why they aren’t uncapped on PC? Surely patches to follow will lessen frame drops spikes etc. Apparently they fixed the demos visual quality?? FSR3 Native AA (no upscaling just FSR AA and access to sharpening) With frame Gen on OR FSR3 Quality Re sharpen as desired and Frame Gen on should be a near perfect 60 fps lock in 1440p but GPU will vary obviously. I do wish and hope the final product will be far improved at launch but idk it’s an SE port.

Man I’m just glad I get a smooth 60fps on this PC demo. The PS5 Demo was a huge turn off for me and a massive WTF for what’s billed as an action game

Seems like Alex’s experience is echoed on both the Steam Deck and the ROG Ally; maybe it’s an AMD issue?

Square needs to talk to Capcom and figure out what they're doing when it comes to PC/Console Optimization

Square has done this before, releasing old build demos before game releases. Guaranteed they just tweaked a few small things from the ps5 quality version and uncapped the main gameplay and put it out. It's def not a pc quality and not indicative of final product. Square can't seem to reconcile that releasing a polished demo is a stronger message than just putting anything out and hoping story alone will grasp people.

10:35 why would they need to use this to improve the final game.. all it takes is three computers to demonstrate the disastrous performance this has on all fronts. From the laughable temporal solutions that can't even fulfill their definitions of Anti Aliasing (DLAA), to the god awful texture filtering, and finally the baffling framerate for a game that doesnt even look current gen. The fact they have courage to even release this is utterly stunning. Sheer lunacy other than some legal contractual thing that forced developers to stick to some corporate mandated promise at all costs.

My weak, feeble 4080 super will crumble under the pressure of the titan fight

I grew up with the real Final fantasy games miss the turn base. But i was suprised the demo was pretty good

The demo itself was pretty disappointing. I feel like my performance was way better before the patch. When the second eidolon battle happened it dropped to 12 fps. But the game was like MGS4. Walk 10 feet watch a uninteresting Cinema, walk 15 feet another Cinema. I'll admit the last 20 minutes of the demo were pretty great so I'll keep my eye on it.

It won't play at all on my Readeon 480. My CPU is AMD 5 5600. Any other game will play on it.

I am HEAPS turned off.... No way am I paying money for something that will perform close to as bad as the demo.

Is the guy on the right new?

I tried it on my 2060 and it wasnt playable at that point even on ultra perf 😅

0:48 why does the ps5 version look way better and more cinematic here with the phoenix in the tunnel? Is there better motion blur or something? Theres a definite cinematic quality to the ps5 comparison vs the pc version in this particular scene, and the ps5 looks better in this particular example imo

they need a pc dev kit lol

Problems with the demo? Good thing it’s just the demo.

Yeah no Ultrawide. That's a huge problem for me.

Lossless scaling 4x framegen gets the cutscenes to 120fps. The stutter is still there though

WTF the game has no ultrawide support. that is an abomination.

Any word about xbox port?

It turns out that my 2016 prebuilt with a GTX 1070 can run it at 60 frames as long as I turn the resolution down to 720P. Yeah, it doesn't look THAT great, but it looks good enough. I already have it on PS5 (it's 99% my wife's game though), but I always love finding opportunities to see how my PC can stack up next to my PS5.

DLSSS and DLAA is not the silver bullet sadly it won't look great on every game. A bit blurry from what I see

Can’t even provide ultrawide in a 2024 triple A. HARD PASS

pc looks blurry

Many*

Square Enix is a joke when it comes to optimizing their games. I remember when they promised in a QnA before release that they would fix the performance on PS5. We are still waiting for that patch and it will never happen. No wonder it runs like shit.

The graphics is very bad on pc

I downloaded the demo. 2 hours later I was done. I had watched 90 minutes of cut scene with less than 30 minutes of gameplay as I stopped to eat. Why would anyone start a game like that? I love a good FF cutscene, and the brutality of FFXVI was a shock tbh, but I wanted gameplay in my demo.

Fromsoft and Square Enix probably has some of the most incompetent programmers in the japanese side of the gaming ecosystem. It wouldn't surprise me, FFXIV lives through spaghetti code and if XVI is a evolution of XIV's Engine, It would probably have similar limitations and flaws akin to bethesda's creation engine.

I like the graphics but the art style in here is so ugly.its like soenthing off ps2

Terrible game gets a terrible port not surprised lol

FF16 engine sucks ass even on PC, what a fail.

looks like FFXIV, tbh

The game being bad is one of the largest of those problems

FF7 Remake all over again

Bring Rebirth on, I don't really cared about 16.

Looks like an awful port, I actually couldn't wait to play this so I bought a PS5, weirdly enough it seems like I made the proper decision.

How much do you have to give to buy a pc wich can run ps5 level games. I know pc does more but hey i can also stream on ps5 or watch youtube or write so whats the deal. Pc should be much much much more stronger so why are they barely stronger(in some games alot but mostly barely)why do i have to put 5000 dollar on pc to play something 500 bucks can play. Whats the deal pc should be stronger has way more power so why cant they use that power. is windows using like 5 ps5 worthy of computing power just to run windows. It was always like this even when ps3 was around ps games were just a little bit better. Paying 5000 for a pc i expect to play any game cyberpunk full rt in 8k without any hassle how the hell are pc way more powerfull where the hell does that power go or are they just not using all that power. I dont understand whats going on pc are more powerfull i understand but what the hell is that power used for is windows such a tough program. Its no longer can it run crysis but can it run windows lol.

I tried it on my steam deck… runs like ASS

Doesn't surprise me the game doesn't actually look great when looked under a magnifying glass. It's basically a modified FF14 engine and that game honestly looks like garbage. Some 14 fans convince themselves it looks good because they make up for a lot of issues with good art style. But the engine just isn't there otherwise.

Your cpu is at 80% usage and youre asking why its stuttering...put a 5700x in there and retest