Introduction

Final Fantasy XV is the latest installment in Square Enix's smash-hit RPG series. While the console version was released in 2016, PC gamers now get to play the game with significantly improved visuals. The game is more focused on open world gameplay than previous titles and takes you, Prince Noctis, on an epic journey to his wedding—with a lot of surprises on the way.

Square Enix's own Luminous Engine is used, which supports both consoles and PC through a single game engine to keep porting complications to a minimum. For PC, the game engine uses the DirectX 11 API and has support for numerous NVIDIA Gameworks features, like ShadowPlay Highlights, Ansel, improved shadows, Hairworks, Flow, Turf Effects, and VXAO. Final Fantasy XV also supports HDR10 if you have such a monitor. A welcome addition is their high-resolution pack available as a free addon.

In this performance review, we put Final Fantasy XV through our selection of graphics cards backed by the latest drivers on our VGA test system. We measure the game's performance across various screen resolutions, with and without the high-resolution texture addon, and even test the game's multi-core CPU performance scaling.