Gadgetory

revisiting final fantasy 15 one more time on the PC and the Xbox now so this is a comparison piece showing the graphics differences between the Xbox 1x version of Final Fantasy 15 and the PC we also equalized the game settings between the two to figure out where the Xbox falls when compared to PC graphics settings and tested the high resolution texture pack to determine whether it's actually worth about 60 to 70 gigabytes of your space so for this video we're looking at console versus PC maximum and average graphics comparisons along with some additional technical deep dives on a few of the graphics elements in the game before that this video is brought to you by the new cable mod Pro Series cable mods new pro cables come with pre-installed closed combs for clean builds accompanied by a revamp to color style and vibrance the cables are now using thicker wires and they've also added right-angled internal USB 3 extension and right-angled SATA data cables by the pro series cable kits at the link below or customize it your cable set with the configurator also linked below we wrote this content into a few pieces the first section talks about graphics technology used in the game subsurface scattering being one of them PBR being another and again a very short revisit of game work technologies if you're curious to learn more about those you can check our previous two content pieces one of which was a follow up benchmark to the playable demo which remains true for the full game basically we found that the original hair works LOD scaling issues have been more or less resolved at this point but other than the graphics information we'll talk about console there's P see normalized graphics so equating the two to each other and then maximum PC graphics with high versus standard texture pack resolution and we've got a couple of other interesting points about how we went through the testing process as well before the comparison a few things to note about the engine we noticed that it appears as if Square Enix is using PBR shaders or physically based rendering PBR is calculated based on metalness and roughness of a surface and mirrors real-world lighting behavior in a full implementation this would include conservation of energy physically correct distribute in patterns and material definitions for conductors and dielectrics and in the case of Final Fantasies implementation this shot of the truck chrome for example the bottom layer near the step on the truck best illustrates some simple PBR implementations where the material is both rough and 100% metal and so we get reflections that are rough across the surface rather than seeing a full orb of light from the Sun being reflected like we do in this tire example we're seeing a more spread out reflection of the Sun instead because it is a rougher surface subsurface scattering also appears early on where an in-game rendered cutscene gives us a glimpse of light scattering beneath the surface of the mechanics nose the fact that you can see blood capillaries beneath the surface of the nose particularly as found at the border of shadows tell us that subsurface scattering is probably used in the game in the CG world like for movies where you don't render in real-time this can be a relatively expensive light bouncing technique that would require tracing light rays beneath the material surface to better determine how light would interact with blood vessels beneath the surface of skin in this example in traditional examples we could show you images of earlobes fingers or other areas of the body with very thin skin where a red tint would be seen from the blood beneath the surface of the skin if you were to shine a light from the opposing side and final fantasy cutting our video back to the mechanic the subsurface scattering is apparent in the nose but we also believe this is somewhat cheated in that's okay though because the approximation looks good and is reasonably accurate and also much cheaper on system resource consumption moving on to set up and test set up for comparison versus the Xbox a couple of notes on testing first off we always restart the game between settings changes to make sure they apply properly because if you don't they will not apply properly to match our PC settings to the Xbox version we first selected the default choice for every option which got us 90% of the way there 90% of the way to equalizing for the graphics on the Xbox that includes average settings for the model LOD anisotropic filtering lighting shadows ambient occlusion and filtering assets like the high quality texture pack geo-mapping or ground tessellation and all Nvidia features were turned off anti-aliasing was set to taa or temporal anti-aliasing and motion blur was turned on and just briefly this is sort of old news now but temporal anti-aliasing is something we covered in the past basically it's the idea where you have a frame to frame anti-aliasing technique so the game is looking at the previous frame and the current or the next or upcoming frame comparing the two and apply an anti-aliasing across them as a delta so you end up with something that in theory should be more accurate frame to frame so that you get better anti a seen in movement but it's not as visible in still screenshots doesn't always work out so well though as we'll see in this game although this wasn't a performance test we limited framerate to the Xbox's cap of 30 FPS for good measure and set resolution scallions 100% since dynamic resolution isn't available on PC this is pretty close as an approximation of what the Xbox is capable of and it's an encouraging sight the Xbox is quote-unquote high setting is the PCs average in almost every category the only oddball setting listed is tier a more texture Ram as the game calls it which we set to highest this controls the amounts of VRAM that the game can request of the GPU which indirectly controls that texture LOD there's no separate texture quality setting the Xbox didn't seem to have any problems keeping textures in memory but the average setting for trm on PC caused visibly low resolution textures on objects more than a short distance away as we can show in a sign of a noodles billboard so we turned this one up Final Fantasy 15 doesn't offer extremely detailed graphics adjustment so this kind of indirect effect is seen in other features for example adjusting lighting effects reflections and the Nvidia flow toggle isn't surfaced at all the nvidia terrain tessellation toggle that was accessible by modifying the benchmark config files originally seems to now be merged under the geo-mapping label but enabling this option also causes an increase in what we think are possibly plain rock static meshes comparing the Xbox one settings versus the PC with max graphics bit unfair but that's the point we can see where the difference is a mirror where some don't between the two titles square emphasize that this wasn't more than a port for PC they put a lot of effort into it put about a year of work into it and it works closely with the major graphics provider and video so you would assume that there would be major graphics uplift versus the original launch we thought this would be worth comparing for Mac's vs Xbox settings we can start with a side-by-side of pushing the car the regalia where the Xbox is immediately observable as lacking any character model reflections or car reflections from passersby the PC with high settings that shows a vehicle and character model reflections though with the Xbox and lower settings PC version reflecting only environment elements like clouds as for foliage and turf foliage is sparse at these lower settings and grass animations are stiff with Tufts of grass clearly constructed of flat plains as usual rather than any sort of particle meshes as we think turf probably uses their patches of ground are flat textures with a few three-dimensional rocks scattered over the surface and enabling geo-mapping gives us terrain tessellation and other effects that deform the ground to create apparent depth this is something you can also see with small pebbles which are part of the terrain tessellation and deformation grass thickens with turf enabled although we never did notice the dynamically reactive grass and the part of the game that we tested which was one of the more heavily advertised features from Nvidia's marketing materials that's not to say that it doesn't happen but we didn't notice it in this part of the game later on a campfire reveals that Nvidia flow is disabled with the average settings on PC despite the lack of an option in the menu hair works is definitely not in use although elaborate fur is still possible without using it as we can see it in both the Xbox and PC versions when the bird swoops down early in gameplay hair works isn't use on some mobs like the first boss monster as we showed when we tested the playable demo but not on the main characters they appear to be using normal meshes which we scraped from the game to confirm using a scraping application for view distance there's a visible radius where shadows appear trees and distant terrain and shadow pop and is still a noticeable problem in all settings configurations even with higher settings although it's worse with the lower or average settings for the highest settings on PC as a side note we did notice some odd graphical bugs that that appeared with these settings but no deal-breakers did Lorraine showed up on locations like the margins of the road where it fades into dirt possibly and likely due to taa we also saw taa issues in the benchmark and the demo when we first tested it where you can see issues with a truck passing by having some ghosting or the fishing pole being the easiest option also having ghosting we think these were likely at least in part due to taa with maybe some motion blur thrown in taa was enabled for every test including on the Xbox and the dithering was present but less visible with Xbox settings it could be that it's intensified by the terrain tessellation on the road side in this earlier example and for one more non deal breaking example of graphical bugs we noticed a transparency issue with the decal on the cab of the Hammerhead tow truck and possibly a couple of other places let's move on to a texture pack comparison for Final Fantasy 15 this part is exclusive to PC and will help us establish our absolute maximum graphics capabilities provided you have the hardware to do it the texture pack is in excess of 60 gigabytes and provides minimally compressed textures at higher resolutions and doesn't seem to affect anything other than texture resolution and quality aside from cutscene quality as well you must restart the game between settings changes as noted as with any benchmark otherwise the differences won't properly emerge when you're toggling this on and off in the game settings these are easy the first Crofton screen shot is of a wall post or the diner with clearly crisper lines reduced aliasing and more legible text when using the higher resolution pack we also see this in the service station texture where the rivets and the walls are less blurry the pixels around the circular edges are smooth and the text is clearer not everything benefits from the texture pack though more important objects like the chocobo vending machine have relatively equal text or fidelity and resolution between both the standard and the high resolution PACs this is also true for most character clothing and other primary character objects although Gladius for example has slightly more detailed texturing and his jacket with the high-res pack it's not as severe as objects of less significant another of those would be the steel beams of some buildings for an insignificant object where we can see blur is reduced and grid is increased in the higher resolution pack as for whether this is worth 60 gigabytes of space you'll have to ask the cutscenes that's where most of the allocation goes but generally speaking no not really separately but related to textures we also briefly tested the game's T RAM setting this is the allocation of video card memory to textures alone and this noodle sign once again somewhat shows the difference it's more programmatic and dependent upon object loading and requests to memory but dropping the setting to average means that textures will be reduced in quality when either insignificant or at medium view distances out of curiosity we briefly tracked the vram consumption with the texture pack enabled and disabled but keep in mind that this is an issue where the amount of memory used appears to depend entirely on how much the game is allowed to request based on the T RAM setting so this is something just like we've talked out in the past we're using something like GPU Z or any other software to show video memory consumption is sort of lying to you it does a good job at approximating but we don't truly know how much memory Final Fantasy is actually leveraging and using every second as you play what we do know is how much memory it requests so in this case it's basically asking for all of the memory on the card unless you enable the lower tier am options like average where it uses significantly less and at that point we still don't know how much memory it's using it for all the assets we just know that it's asking for less of the card so we don't truly know how much B RAM is required to make the game look the way it does at the highest settings on our 1080 Ti but it's a decent amount and in the very least it does request all that does not mean you need 11 gigabytes but it's asked for it so Final Fantasy 15 windows Edition is definitely the best looking version of the game that's probably not too much of a surprise it's refreshingly easy to spot the improvements overall between Xbox and PC turf effects and terrain tessellation do a lot of the work here in terms of making them look different that doesn't mean it looks better it's up to you to decide that but to put our foot down a bit more in the benchmark and the playable demo testing we did previously it was hard to say whether they the addition to the experience was justified by the performance hit something we tested more previously it's not as bad as it was in the benchmark definitely we we've now basically been vindicated and have validated our statements that the benchmark is completely useless as a tool because it doesn't mirror the gameplay really at all a lot of stuff has changed and improved the final fantasy team Square Enix has done well to improve those things and make sure that things like hair hair works lod and object : have been massively improved something we talked on the playable demo benchmarks where things that are distant or at least now really low level of detail to the point we're talking about super low poly a couple of Polly's to draw an entire tank for example as we showed previously so they've definitely improved it they've done well to address a lot of the concerns that we had and as far as the game work stuff a lot of that is now bundled into other settings or is minimized in some ways so a geo-mapping appears to include terrain desolation we're not clear on that that's kind of educated speculation flow has been merged into some other option as well but it's also insignificant because it only appears in campfires for the most part and overall the game looks pretty good it does have a couple of bugs we don't really think the 65 gigabyte asset pack is necessary at all and the difference at this point comes down to just normal Xbox vs PC Hardware differences where the PC version basically equals the Xbox if you drop down to average settings so that's it for this one if you want to see performance video card performance and so forth you can check our previous content piece the playable demo the benchmark 1 as stated in that benchmark is basically entirely invalid now because the benchmark was flawed so don't use that to reference performance anymore it does not apply to the final game that's it for this one subscribe for more as always you go to store that gamers Nexus dotnet to pick up a shirt like this one or backorder one of our GN mod maps that are coming up in their next production run soon and go to patreon.com/scishow and access it helps out directly thanks for watching I'll see you all next time you