Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth - PlayStation 5 - The FULL Digital Foundry Tech Review 

"A bit of ghosting" is an understatement. It's insanely noticeable, and I don't usually see TAA's ghosting.

Ok no joke I'm really impressed that Tifa's chest at 2:36 reacts to her arms realistically!!!

6:50 just standing there letting Aerith struggle.

"Barret's climbing animations seem implausible" while Red XIII is just jumping around in the background lmao.

12:15 a BIT of ghosting!?! It looks absolutely atrocious!

2:37 Yes, big upgrades.

"There's a lot of nice incidental details in Rebirth's open world segments" he says, as a deer disappears into the wind before his eyes.

4:30 holy ghosting

You all saw the disappearing deer @3:53 right?

The lighting choices are truly baffling.

Really wish 40fps was more standard. Really enjoy it on games that have it.

Very strange how they downgraded the lighting compared to the first remake

There are a lot of areas that go from pitch black to very bright purely based on camera angle. For example when you enter the reactor for the first time, its pitch black then goes very bright depending on camera position/location.

The ghosting on that Segway hurts my eyes

I expect PC release to have all the same flaws but with added shader compilation and traversal stutters.

Glad to see they kept in the random PS2 era textures and geometry. Spotting those was my favorite part of Remake.

When I played FF7 remake, even on PS4, I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about the graphics at all. In this, even though I love the gameplay, I'm constantly aware of the graphical limitations.

Performance mode is super underwhelming the way it looks rn.

The amount of pop in in this game is insane, also has graphical bugs even in graphics mode. Crazy how no one is speaking how bad it is.

Square forgot that ambient occlusion exist. Nextgen devs really forgot the art of baked lightning, simple but efficient AO, simple cubemap reflections on large body of water, and dynamic shadows. Those super poor shadows and lack of shadow casting lights makes you forget Unreal is even using deffered rendering. Honestly sometimes it feels like going back to oldgen style of rendering and focusing on more poly, and higher final picture quality would lead to better looking games overall.

Both modes look undercooked. I honestly like Remake visuals much more. Especially the lighting. Shinra building chapters were pure CGI tier.

I've been playing this and can say that the low graphic textures are very apparent. The biggest issue IMO is the lack of a motion blur toggle for the graphics mode, reverse ff16 kind of way, which if present might help hide some of the texture issues. Fortunatly, I am having enough fun to enjoy the whole but it is sad that FF7 Intergrade a 2.5 year old game, has better visual fidelity than its sequel.

I prefer playing on performance mode, but I found out recently that I’m missing out on some content. In more populated areas like Costa de Sol, certain background npcs will only appear in graphics mode. These npcs can be very unique, having their own animations and dialogue. On the beach you’ll find a couple of muscle heads showing off. Switching between the modes these npcs disappear and reappear like Thanos just snapped his fingers.

4:30 someone call ghost busters

Idk, I played 1080p games that appear way sharper than this

The game doesn’t look like a ps5 game. It almost definitely wasn’t build from the ground up on ps5 like they claimed it was. The texture, resolution and last gen animations for certain things really date it. When you see a game like horizon forbidden west, it really shows off what the ps5 can do. When I see ff 7 rebirth it looks like a game that could have come out 5-10 years ago. I don’t think it looks any better than final fantasy xv which is an 8 year old game. The cinematics, and money shots they used for the trailers are really incredible. The Combat is great. But the out dated open work design like the Ubisoft towers, etc make it feel like a grind. After 30 hours I was really finding the exploration a chore. I like exploring but it was just generic open world stuff again. I really wish they did something different for rebirth but instead just ended up going with an outdated open world design. The resolution really is shit. They tried patching it twice and it’s not better. How a game that’s running on a console that’s apparently almost 10 times more powerful than the ps4, and can’t even run a solid, clear resolution baffles me. In many ways remake looks much better. Yeh, rebirth is open world but when I see a game like forbidden west and I can’t help but feel disappointment. Why we are getting ps4 quality games on the ps5 which has been out for around 4 years is extremely disappointing. You would expect a certain standard to be met but it doesn’t seem like there is a standard when it comes to current gen games.

Every moment I spend in the game I see some wonderful, inspired content practically in the same frame as the cheapest, nose to the grind crunch work possible. It constantly feels like they had a awesome core team doing visionary work and then a much larger B team to fill in the rest. Also, it feels like they got a group of complete 100% amateurs for their compression team that were also on a blazing fast crunch.

This game makes me really wish we had a PS5 pro or a PC release. The 60fps mode verges on unacceptably soft on a 4k monitor up close, and I can definitely notice the lack of motion blur in the 30fps mode. Getting a patch for motion blur on 30fps should be possible, if not a sharper resolve for the 60fps mode.

I really find the camera judder in quality mode to be an absolute deal breaker. Think I'll just suck up performance modes blurry visuals

I feel like these reviews overestimate the max power of ps5. It was never powered adequately for full res 4k and i feel like the expectations are ridiculous. I found this game graphically impressive for the sheer amount of geometry and draw distance on the screen at a single time.

Wait if the resolution of performance mode is 1080+ then why does it look so freaking blurry?

Some of the lighting and texture issues are strange because FF16 (although a different dev house and engine of square) is also on PS5 and it looks absolutely amazing. It’s a huge night and day difference if you look at both games side by side in terms of lighting and texture detail. Both are great either way.

When I played the demo I was baffled at how blurry it looks in performance mode and I saw what looked like upscaling artifacts all over the place. They should have implemented fsr 2.1 or something similar because we have way better upscaling tech.

Unreal Engine is pretty much either a corridor simulator or a game that looks bad to get it to render more. It does look pretty good when simulating corridors on a US$3,000 PC with everything set to max though, and I can admit that. Engines, being code, follow the same rules programmers deal with when coding anything. Basically, it is a pipedream to make an incredibly generic solution to a group of similar problems (Here, the problem is "Make an engine to power our game") that does everything well. Here, doing stuff well is achieving better performance at a given fidelity. What a generic solution (UE) brings to the table is the coder not having to program the engine... at the cost of efficiency, and it also brings to the table corporations being able to steal workers from each other. Company A uses UE and company B uses UE. That means A can steal from B and vice versa with the worker joining the team ready to work on UE rather than needing to learn a new, priority engine. The fact is, if experts are doing it correctly, an engine designed specifically for a style of game will have higher FPS for a given fidelity compared to a generic solution like UE (unless your game is a mirror copy of what UE does best). I dislike the proliferation of UE and the excitement of that proliferation. What excites me is games that are not corridor simulators using their own handcrafted engines made specifically for a style of game a studio tends to make. Viva la résistance! Corporations, do the right thing and make your own dang engines for your style of game instead of forcing your game into generic UE, which makes for a.) lower performance for a given fidelity and b.) many games that feel incredibly similar in gameplay as to fit the game to the engine instead of fitting the engine to the game. I get it. You don't have to program an engine if you choose UE -- just modify it instead. And you can steal workers from other companies without them being in learning mode for as long. It's the right thing to do, however, when a company hires extremely potent experts to handcraft an engine for a particular game style. If you don't believe me, think of your top 10 games of all time. Check if they use a proprietary engine. Likely, the vast majority do.

I gave up and set my PS5 to 1080p and put on graphics mode. Works great now. But its insane next gen is 1080p at 30fps lmao

I can live with low res textures here and there or else the game would be >300GB. The gameplay is what makes or breaks a game and this game has insane amounts of it. Same goes for the story in this case and RPGs in general. However the auto exposure in this game is atrotious at times. UE4 is not meant for seamless, big open worlds that can transition from in door to out door and it shows. I sincerely hope they will address this for the next installment. Also curious if there's gonna be patches that smooth things out. If there will be DLC I hope it won't be exclusive to the next console version like it was with Intergrade and PS4 Pro.

Really curious, what you can do in the PC port just through the ini. In Remake you were able to quite drastically increase aspects of the visuals just through the ini. Add upscaled Textures and the visuals of Remake were a lot improved.

As someone who is struggling to finish 16 due to (amongst other gripes) the huge delta in Graphics and Performance modes, this isn't boding well either. Please can we have a sweet-spot between the two - like a 1440p/60 mode?

I am astonished to see such awful shadows and low-resolution textures in a game made exclusively for the PS5. How did they look at this and think "This is good enough"?

10:37. You should've tried 1080p as well depending on your TV upscaler

I'm still shocked how polarizing the FF7Remake entries are. Same with Integrade. How in the world is the general art direction so good but the lack of polish so apparent?? Even on PC Integrade isnt really good to this day, yet the basic visuals are really good even on older hardware. There are so many low res assets mixed in with beautiful scenery, I dont understand Square

We really need a dynamic mode with 30-ish fps while exploring and 60fps when entering any battle

For those watching but hasn’t played the game: 1. The game looks fine on my 55” Sony 90J. 2. It is a surprisingly beautiful open world game. And perform really well throughout my experience.

Rebirth looks great most of the time but what is up with developers messing up indirect lighting? I was puzzled seeing Persona 3 Remake lacking indirect lighting the PS2 original had. Baked GI should be a thing of past but if it is used, I expect much better results in a PS5 title. Lumen and other real-time techniques seen in the likes of Metro Exodus Enhanced and Avatar look better to me and are still used in the performance modes.

I’ve said it for a long time now. Visually 16 looks so much better and polished. People over at reddit are fanboy coping when they disagree.

At this rate , FF7 part 3 will look like a PS1 era game

Seems to streamline development they just made a continuation of the PS4 version. They made the improvements to PS5 like they did with Intergrade but the baseline is still PS4. Tbh, for FF7, I don't care lol. The character models look great and the overall scenery is beautiful. I could nit pick textures in the environments all day but then I'd be missing one of the best games of the year.

I'm glad I wasnt the only one to notice the pretty rough lighting. Definitely the greatest thing that stands out. Not sure what happened ....

10:45 Is some of the cliff missing? I can see through some of it

What bothers me the most is when the lighting goes off (no shadows) and character models look like something from PS3 era. Just check when Cloud/Sephiroth do their synergy ability in the prologue. It's jarring when Remake character models were always gorgeous no matter what happens on screen. Also nobody's gonna mention the weird pop in in the open environments? (bushes disappearing, etc).

Please put icon/symbols on materia next installment so you can identify any materia at a glance when in the menu. Eg, lightning symbol on lightning materia. This will make for easier, faster materia management and equipping.

I wonder if this game started development as a PS4 game, or if a PS4 port was intended at some point _à la_ Resident Evil 4.

Well this is unfortunate since many reviewers were promising that “the final game looks much better than the demo”

they should just call the Performance mode "Pixel-Art Mode"

The Anti-aliasing on the hair and foliage is exceptionally bad and yes the lighting and shadows is very inconsistent and don't even get me started on the obvious pop in and glitches throughout the world.

Do we know when and how they will improve performance mode graphics already?

This game REALLY needs a 40fps mode.

Very disappointing seeing as how gorgeous and well developed FF16 looks even on performance mode

I’ve been playing on graphics mode and it’s fine on a large TV with sensitivity turned up. I’ll play at 4k 120+ fps on my monitor when it comes to pc. My main problem is the LIGHTING and HDR looks mad washed out

For me the way some structures appear in the distance can really break immersion. Especially compared to ff16

I do wonder if they will try to patch a bit the lighting. Kinda like how forspoken did

I'll forgive chapter 1 low rez rock textures because they have to use gpu power to render Sephiroth and his glorious hair.

Think I'll wait and see if Square makes a patch. Performance mode looks too blurry to me atm.

There are difference aside from image resolution between graphics and performance. For example you lose a lot of crowd npcs in performance mode and some objects have lower poly count.

2:12 her arms, right...

I just started the game. I played Intermission a few days ago and the difference in graphical quality is jarring so I immediately came here to make sure I wasn't crazy. I'm still in Nibelheim but so far Graphics mode is much sharper but feels like 20fps. Performance is significantly smoother but is so blurry that I can tell sitting 10ft from the TV and my god when I actually walked up to it to see how blurry it was, I was kind of astonished at how bad it was. Graphics mode feels unplayable to me so I guess I just have to deal with Performance. I hope they do something to fix this soon.

It's like they accidently gave us the PS4 Port on the PS5. At this rate PS4 Remastered games look better than Native PS5 games. : (!

i believe nier automata and nier replicant have something like a 1080p or possibly even less resolution, yet the resolution there still looks better than performance mode here.

Really great tech summary, Oliver! You maybe downplayed how high expectations are for the FF7 graphics to be top bar, especially for a current-gen only release. Missed opportunity in that light!

If horizon Forbidden West can look as good as it does and run pretty smoothly I feel the issues can be solved to run at least a little better

I’m playing on a 1080p monitor and performance mode still looks very low res

I was shocked how bad performance mode looks. This may be one i wait to play until its patched

The game looks amazing and is managed to be much bigger and at the same time more detailed than FF16.This review really shows the limits of doing a technical analysis only. Especially jarring is the comment at the end saying that FF fans will like it, as if the game isn't amazing enough. There simply isn't another game as detailed as this out there, every single angle looks handmade (even though it probably wasn't). The environments are vast and believable.

Man, can't really decide between the two modes. I always go for the higher frame-rate but the hit in res/sharpness is just too noticeable, especially in a game as beautiful and full of detail as this one. On the other hand though, it's really difficult for me to go back to 30fps, just simply panning the camera makes me want to go back to 60fps asap and combat feels super awful in 30fps. I really wish Square would've put more effort into the performance mode optimization, especially when we have so many examples out there with really good-looking performance modes. I have an oled Samsung s90c and perhaps I will play with 30fps and the motion interpolation turned on, the results are way far from ideal but it does smooth things a little bit. Either that or wait for the PC release, but there's no way I'll be able to avoid spoilers until then.

It needs like a 45 fps mode that mixes resolution and fps to find a sweet spot.

For some reason putting the PS5 in 1440p and playing in performance looks way better than 4K in performance.

Thank you for not going into any story, character, or set piece specifics. I’ve gone on a total promotional material blackout, sans this video and the demo, and this was exactly as informative to listen to (I didn’t even watch) as I wanted it to be. Thank you for that discretion.

What is performance mode like on a 1080p screen where there is no upscaling to 4k required?

On my LG CX Oled it looks so blurry it hurts. Graphic Mode looks fine but that 30fps is choppy like hell. It feels not like 30 fps, it feels much worse. For me the game is unplayable

I found turning up the sharpness on my tv made it look better/less blurry. Not an actual fix but worth a try

So better wait another 2months to play this.

I think the last game looked better 😮

Is anybody else getting signal drops when scenes change? It's like it's having to drop the input signal in order to render the beginning of a cutscene from gameplay. Any thoughts?

basically they put their focus on the cutscenes to the determent of the overworld, just like in Remake but more pronounced with the larger world not surprised, or even particularly disappointed, but the performance mode being so blurry is pretty bad, hopefully it'll get patched

One of those rare cases where the game needs a remaster right on launch. But the game is amazing, so I am still having a blast.

Thx for keeping it spoiler free. I'm still on the fence about this title, so will wait for some more information. This helped a bit at least.

I almost bought a ps5 just for this game. while I have a PC with a 4080. gotta stay patient.

What's the likelihood this will be fixed with a future patch?

This game doesn‘t even use the full potential of the Ps5… back in 2020 when the remake came out on Ps4 it looked fine even on performance mode, but here the textures hurt my eyes..

I just finished Remake on PC and I absolutely adored it, I'm super excited to play Rebirth but having to go from a high resolution and framerate experience on PC to either choosing between 30fps or a blurry 50-60 fps experience is kind of a bummer. I really wish that Square would do multiplatform day and date releases for their major FF releases. I was also hoping that some of the terrible textures found in FF: Remake would have been addressed for FF: Rebirth but oh well, I will still play this at launch as I enjoyed Remake so much.

Yet another PS4-looking PS5 EXCLUSIVE game! 4 YEARS into this gen, people!

I think this game would look perfect made with Decima engine!

they have to fix the performance mode. just unacceptable right now with the way it scales + the low res post processing

The lack of proper shadows and ambient occlusion is sad. Cause the pure asset quality and lighting has a lot of beauty to it, but without the nuance of proper shadows to ground everything, it comes off very flat.

There's a weird audio issue in this game, at least when hooked up to a C9 and using audio passthrough. If audio is set to PCM, 5.1 doesn't really work right. There's no subwoofer at all and the balance just seems off. Switched it to Atmos and now it sounds great. Never experienced that with any other game, super weird.

I'm so tired of console games having the choice between poor frame rate and unsharp presentation. Can the devs just balance the graphics too a point where we can have a sharp image with an acceptable framerate? I'd rather have less fidelity if it means the game runs good and has a sharp presentation..

I saw this blurry image in the demo and was told again and again it's a pre build. Clearly that was a lie. It's incredibly frustrating, given this is my Fav game of all time. Never mind.

2:38 to 2:42 scene made my heart melt 🫠

With the PC version of remake I found that I needed at least 90fps after I have turned up the camera sensitivity for it to not look laggy (I leave my frame cap at 120). IDK why the devs always aim for either (30fps)4k or performance. An option for balanced graphics(1440p) while targeting a higher framerate would be a much better experience.

Nice. SquareEnix. Amazing artists. Not great engineers... Their art direction and strengths do cover a lot of ground though. I think this is an overall beautiful game, but not flattering for analysis.