Update: Square Enix is aware of this issue, has acknowledged its existence, and is working on an update for launch.

Although we don't believe this to be intentional, the Final Fantasy XV benchmark is among the most misleading we’ve encountered in recent history. This is likely a result of restrictive development timelines and a resistance to delaying product launch and, ultimately, that developers see this as "just" a benchmark. That said, the benchmark is what's used for folks to get an early idea of how their graphics cards will perform in the game. From what we've seen, that's not accurate to reality. Not only does the benchmark lack technology shown in tech demonstrations (we hope these will be added later, like strand deformation), but it is still taking performance hits for graphics settings that fail to materialize as visual fidelity improvements. Much of this stems from GameWorks settings, so we've been in contact with nVidia over these findings for the past few days.

As we discovered after hours of testing the utility, the FFXV benchmark is disingenuous in its execution, rendering load-intensive objects outside the camera frustum and resulting in a lower reported performance metric. We accessed the hexadecimal graphics settings for manual GameWorks setting tuning, made easier by exposing .INI files via a DLL, then later entered noclip mode to dig into some performance anomalies. On our own, we’d discovered that HairWorks toggling (on/off) had performance impact in areas where no hair existed. The only reason this would happen, aside from anomalous bugs or improper use of HairWorks (also likely, and not mutually exclusive), would be if the single hair-endowed creature in the benchmark were drawn at all times.

The benchmark is rendering creatures that use HairWorks even when they’re miles away from the character and the camera. Again, this was made evident while running benchmarks in a zone with no hairworks whatsoever – zero, none – at which point we realized, by accessing the game’s settings files, that disabling HairWorks would still improve performance even when no hairworks objects were on screen. Validation is easy, too: Testing the custom graphics settings file by toggling each setting, we're able to (1) individually confirm when Flow is disabled (the fire effect changes), (2) when Turf is disabled (grass strands become textures or, potentially, particle meshes), (3) when Terrain is enabled (shows tessellation of the ground at the demo start' terrain is pushed down and deformed, while protrusions are pulled up), and (3) when HairWorks is disabled (buffalo hair becomes a planar alpha texture). We're also able to confirm, by testing the default "High," "Standard," and "Low" settings, that the game's default GameWorks configuration is set to the following (High settings):

• VXAO: Off
• Shadow libs: Off
• Flow: On
• HairWorks: On
• TerrainTessellation: On
• Turf: On

Benchmarking custom settings matching the above results in identical performance to the benchmark launcher window, validating that these are the stock settings. We must use the custom settings approach, as going between Medium and High offers no settings customization, and also changes multiple settings simultaneously. To isolate whether a performance change is from GameWorks versus view distance and other settings, we must individually test each GameWorks setting from a baseline configuration of "High." 

Final Fantasy XV is shaping up to be intensely demanding of GPU hardware, with greater deltas developing between nVidia & AMD devices at High settings than Medium settings. The implication is that, although other graphics settings (LOD, draw distance) change between High and Medium, the most significant change is that of GameWorks options. HairWorks, Shadow libraries, and heavy ground tessellation are all toggled on with High and off with Medium. The ground tessellation is one of the most impactful to performance, particularly on AMD hardware; that said, although nVidia fares better, the 10-series GPUs still struggle with frametime consistency when running all the GameWorks options. This is something we’re investigating further, as we’ve (since writing this benchmark) discovered how to toggle graphics settings individually, something natively disabled in the FFXV benchmark. Stay tuned for that content.

In the meantime, we still have some unique GPU benchmarks and technical graphics analysis for you. One of our value adds is 1440p benchmarks, which are, for some inexplicable reason, disabled in the native FFXV benchmark client. We automated and scripted our benchmarks, enabling us to run tests at alternative resolutions. Another value-add is that we’re controlling our benchmarks; although it is admirable and interesting that Square Enix is collecting and aggregating user benchmark data, that data is also poisoned. The card hierarchy makes little sense at times, and that’s because users run benchmarks with any manner of variables – none of which are accounted for (or even publicly logged) in the FFXV benchmark utility.

Separately, we also confirmed with Square Enix that the graphics settings are the same for all default resolutions, something that we had previously questioned.

This content piece will explore the performance anomalies and command line options for the Final Fantasy XV benchmark, with later pieces going detailed on CPU and GPU benchmarks. Prior to committing to massive GPU and CPU benchmarks, we always pretest the game to understand its performance behaviors and scaling across competing devices. For FFXV, we’ve already detailed FPS impact of benchmark duration, impact of graphics settings and resolution on scaling, we’ve used command line to automate and custom configure benchmarks, and we’ve discovered poor frametime performance under certain benchmarking conditions.

We started out by testing for run-to-run variance, which would be used to help locate outliers and determine how many test passes we need to conduct per device. In this frametime plot, you can see that the first test pass, illustrated on a GTX 1070 with the settings in the chart, exhibits significantly more volatile frametimes. The frame-to-frame interval occasionally slams into a wall during the first 6-minute test pass, causing noticeable, visible stutters in gameplay.

As everyone begins running the Final Fantasy XV PC benchmark, we’d like to notify the userbase that, on our test platform, we have observed some run-to-run variance in frame-to-frame intervals from one pass to the next. This seems to stem entirely from the first pass of the benchmark, where the game is likely still loading all of the assets into memory. After the first pass, we’ve routinely observed improved performance on runs two, three, and onward. We attribute this to first-time launcher initialization of all the game assets.

Our Destiny 2 GPU benchmark highlighted massive performance uplift vs. beta on some devices, upwards of 50% on Vega, but was conducted in largely GPU-constrained scenarios. For this content piece, we’ll be exploring the opposite: CPU-constrained scenarios to benchmark Destiny 2 performance on AMD Ryzen and Intel Kaby/Coffee Lake parts, including the R7 1700, R5 1600X, R3 1200, and i7-7700K, i5-7600K, i3-8350K, and G4560.

Most of our test notes have already been recapped in the GPU benchmark, and won’t be fully repeated. Again, we ran a wide spread of tests during the beta, which will be informing our analysis for the Destiny 2 launch benchmarks. Find the previous content below:

• Destiny 2 Beta GPU Benchmark (+ graphics optimization guide, PvP scalability)
• Destiny 2 Beta CPU Benchmark (soon replaced by our Destiny 2 launch CPU bench)
• Destiny 2 texture comparison