Final Fantasy 16 is easily one of the most stunning current-gen games out there, going toe-to-toe with PlayStation’s own flagship titles such as Bluepoint Games’ Demon’s Souls and Guerrilla Games’ Horizon Forbidden West. With PlayStation finally shifting towards PS5 exclusives, FF16 sets the benchmark for what a true next-gen game should look like.
Similarly to PlayStation first-party exclusives, Square Enix and Creative Business Unit 3’s latest action role-playing game comes packed with different graphics modes for the PlayStation 5, giving players complete liberty over how they want to experience their time in Valesthia. Here’s a comprehensive guide on the different graphics modes in Final Fantasy 16.
What graphics modes are available in Final Fantasy 16 for the PlayStation 5?
Similarly to any modern AAA release for the current generation of consoles, i.e., PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, FF16 features two graphics modes for players to switch between. Both modes target different resolutions as well as framerates, which does affect how you get to experience the game as a whole. Surprisingly, there are a few caveats to the graphics modes.
The two graphics modes available in Final Fantasy 16 are:
- Graphics (Fidelity) mode: This is the default mode the game starts with. In this mode, the resolution is a targeted 4K (2160p), but it’s upscale from 1440p, with a fixed 30fps frame-rate.
- Frame-rate (Performance) mode: This is basically the performance mode that, on paper, targets a smooth 60fps gameplay experience at the cost of reduced resolution from 4K to 1440p. However, the 1440p isn’t native but is upscaled from the 1080p sample using AMD’s FSR.
The catch is that the performance mode is highly unstable, with frequent frame-rate drops and major drops to the lower 30s. However, these declines are mostly present when exploring the open-ended map of the game. As soon as you enter combat, the game stabilizes to 60fps, with very aggressive use of dynamic resolution that can drop its base resolution to 720p.
While Square Enix did issue a day-one patch to address the performance hiccups, especially in the “Frame-rate”mode, the 300-megabyte patch barely made any difference compared to the game’s performance in the demo.
Having played a great chunk of Final Fantasy 16 in both Graphics and Frame-rate mode, I highly recommend sticking to the 30fps Graphics mode until Square Enix fixes its performance mode issues. The graphics mode does have occasional frame-rate drops, but it’s quite negligible compared to the frequent hiccups you will get in the performance mode.
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