Final Fantasy XV Windows Edition Benchmarks... So Far

Introduction

Full disclaimer: I've never played a Final Fantasy game before, so what piqued my interest with Final Fantasy XV is the marketing engine behind the game pushing the PC version of Square Enix's latest and greatest, and that NVIDIA has pushed a considerable weight behind it filling it with GameWorks technologies.

Another disclaimer: I didn't have much time to run the benchmark as my life has been overwhemingly busy lately, as I've just gotten back from a 10-day pacific cruise (it was amazing, my first proper holiday in 16 years). On top of that, I had bumped my content up by 300-500% depending on the day, during CES earlier last month. To top it off, I leave for San Diego on a work trip in 8 hours, so yeah - been a little busy.

Anyway, we're here to test out the best version of Final Fantasy XV, which is the forthcoming Windows Edition. The PC version of FFXV rocks some pretty beautiful graphics at times, with Square Enix releasing a benchmark earlier on in the weekend that let gamers run their PCs through Final Fantasy XV Windows Edition's paces, and receive a benchmark result.

We quickly decided to run the game on all of our graphics cards from both AMD and NVIDIA's latest generations, including the Radeon RX 500 and RX Vega series from AMD, and NVIDIA's entire GeForce GTX 10 series of cards.

System Specs & Benchmark Run

Final Fantasy XV Windows Edition was benchmarked on our trusty GPU test bed that is powered by an Intel Core i7-7700K, AORUS Z270X GAMING 9 motherboard, and 16GB of G.SKILL TridentZ DDR4-4000 RAM. It's powered by Corsair's super-awesome AX1500i PSU, and runs Windows 10 on OCZ's RD400 NVMe M.2 SSD.

Detailed Tech Specs

• CPU: Intel Core i7-7700K
• Cooler: Nocua U12S
• MB: AORUS Z270X-Gaming 9
• RAM: 16GB (2x8GB) G.SKILL Trident Z 4000MHz DDR4
• SSD: 1TB OCZ RD400 NVMe M.2
• PSU: Corsair AX1500i
• Chassis: In Win X-Frame

Benchmarks - 1080p

Benchmarks - 4K

Final Thoughts

This isn't the final version of Final Fantasy XV Windows Edition, so I'm not going to put 100% faith behind the performance we're seeing here. This is merely a 'hey check this out' article for what should be one of the hottest games of next month.

AMD had its new Radeon Adrenalin Edition 18.2.1 drivers out for testing at the time, while we ran NVIDIA's latest GeForce 390.77 WHQL drivers which didn't pack any Final Fantasy XV Windows Edition support or enhancements. Our friends over at GamersNexus did a great deep dive (as usual guys, keep it up!) which explains some of the performance anomalies associated with NVIDIA's included GameWorks technology which is run by default on GeForce graphics cards when FFXV Windows Edition is run on the High Quality visual setting.

You'll need a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti or TITAN Xp to hit 4K 60FPS, or even close, in Final Fantasy XV Windows Edition. AMD can't hold a candle to NVIDIA in this game right now, as their flagship Radeon RX Vega 64 isn't even up to scratch with its whizz-bang HBM2 tech.

NVIDIA's huge $1200 graphics card in the TITAN Xp can handle everything you throw at it, but we'll reserve judgment for the best graphics card for Final Fantasy XV Windows Edition when the full version of the game launches on March 6.