Gadgetory

welcome back to Harper unboxed today we're checking out Final Fantasy 15 CPU performance using the new standalone benchmark which has been released ahead of next month's PC launch I asked if you guys wanted a benchmark over the game with 30-plus GPUs of the almost 5,000 people that voted 60% of you were very keen on the idea that being the case I decided to get on with the benchmarking but before things really got rolling I actually ended up changing gears and decided to do CPU testing first rather than the GPU testing as it just looked a bit more interesting I still do plan to conduct extensive GPU benchmarks later in the week though the reason I wanted to look at CPU performance first is because the game is extremely CPU intensive far more so than I was expecting developer square-enix recommends gamers pack at least a core i7 3770 or an FX 8350 typically I'd say that's significantly more firepower from Intel but whatever we'll look into that shortly the point here being the game calls for 8 threaded CPUs for the recommended specs while on the GPU front they believe you'll get away with the GTX 760 or an r9 280 oddly in that comparison AMD packs far more firepower but then this is an Nvidia sponsored title which game works baked in according to Nvidia the game features integrated Nvidia flow in video here works Nvidia hybrid first and trace shadows Nvidia turf effects and NVIDIA voxel ambient occlusion as I understand these game work features are only enabled with the higher-quality presets although the CPU testing has been carried out using a GeForce GTX 1080i I've also tested with these standard and light quality presets as well the standalone benchmark runs for over 5 minutes and covers several events maps and characters used in the game for our tests though we are reporting frame rates across a 90 second piece of that benchmark and all results are based on an average of 3 runs the test begins at the start of the car journey then and shortly after everyone gets out of the car to begin their chicken ride as you do please note I found the frame rates were often negatively impacted when fading in and out between scenes so I avoided think across those as always any Auto overclocking functions in the bias were disabled and lock CPUs were paired with the appropriate memory for example a core i3 8100 was tested with ddr4 2400 memory the unlocked processors were tested with ddr4 3200 memory and this was also true for the AMD Rison cpus again the geforce gtx 1080i was used for all testing with the latest drivers so let's get into the results starting things off we have the higher quality results at tally P and for those wondering this is the maximum quality preset which has all the game works features enabled here the gtx 1080i created a system bottleneck with an average of 91 FPS so quite shocking to see such a high end GPU limited to less than 100 FPS at this relatively low resolution first graph let's focus on the average frame rates before sorting the data by the frame time results here we see the rise in processors all perform very well in relation to the Intel hñ CPUs though Intel is being limited by the gtx 980ti here even the much older core i7 2670 50 looked quite good though the a12 9800 falls into a heap here and really isn't able to deliver playable performance sorting the data from the 1% low frame time results we see at the 87 RK is 23% fast and horizon 7 1800 X and Rison 5 1600 X the 1800 X is roughly on par for Sandy Bridge 26 under came quite shockingly the FX 8350 that said we see reasonable performance across the entire field with the exception of the a12 9800 then if we focus on the point one percent data the older 2600 K and FX 8350 processors fall away as do the more modern quad-core processors such as the Rison 3 1300 X and core i3 8100 though the higher clocked a 350 K still does quite well since we were so heavily limited at turn DP with the gtx 1080i at least for the high and eights gen core processors I decided to try the 720p resolution here the 87 arcade was now 11% fast in the 1800 X for the average frame rate though the 1% load data was much the same despite pulling away by an 18 percent margin for the 0.1% low result okay so there's the high quality results and the most part things looked pretty good there was the occasional frame study here and there but that was smooth doubt due to the three run average so potentially a little bit misleading there but I'll wait to get into that till we actually have the game unfortunately that frame stuttering I'm talking of that we're seen even with a core i7 87 okay and GTX tonight eti so there's probably still some optimization work to be done even on invidious behalf that so though if we disable the game works features using the standard quality pros at least that's what I believe we're doing and the performance smoothed out quite considerably and we saw a few other interesting things as well so let's move on and take a look at those results here are the standard quality results at any p.m. right away we are seeing more consistent performance with perhaps the exception of the older 2600 k in FX 8350 processors however looking at the 8700 K in the 1800 X we now see a much smaller difference in performance the 87 RK is now just 12% fast when comparing the 0.1% results whereas previously it was almost 30% faster the variation in the average framerate and 1% lower result is also file a significant in fact horizon looks very impressive using the standard quality settings as the rise in v 1400 delivers much more consistent performance when compared to say the core i3 8100 for example if we sort the graph by the one percent lower results we see just how close it is between the top six processes which includes the rise in seven 8200 X along with the risin 5 1600 X and 1500 X meanwhile the rise in three 1200 is comparable to the core i3 83 50k and core i7 2680 350 also does surprisingly well as it does manage to get amongst that bunch now I thought while I was at it why not invest the time to check out the light quality preset and this led to some very interesting findings normally intel's higher clock cpus run away with the low resolution low-quality testing as they provide much higher maximum frame rates and we do see that here when looking at the average frame rates the 8th gen core i5 and core i7 processes we're able to max out the gtx today to add a hundred and seventy-one FPS on average making them at least 11 percent faster than the Rison 7 1800 X however you might have noticed something strange when looking at the frame time data so let's move on to focus on that here we see something very unexpected when sorting the data by the one percent low result the Rison cpus come out on top in fact even the Rison 313 higher actors beat the core i7 87 are okay that's not the case for the 0.1% result but here there isin five and rise in seven CPUs still beat the mighty core i7 87 okay this is very unusual I'll have to do a bit more digging to work out what's going on here well there was certainly some interesting results there and it should give you a good idea of the processing power you'll require to play Final Fantasy 15 next month assuming nothing changes between now and when the game is released next month I enough to assume though that the benchmark tool is very accurate given the developer has released it ahead of time to allow gamers to prepare their systems based on my testing if you have a quad core that's clock below 4 gigahertz you're probably going to struggle with anything more than the light quality settings the game is extremely CPU intensive for example the 12 threaded 87 ok rarely dip below 40 percent utilization and in our own has spent most of its time hovering over 50% at times hitting as high as 80% it was a similar story for the rise in 718 hundred so more time was spent hovering around 30 to 40 percent still the lower and rise and CPUs featuring 12 or less threads were very heavily utilized I should note that these 1600 X and 1800 X were 5 to 10% faster with SMT disabled depending on the test but I haven't shown any of those results and I didn't go to in-depth the testing as I doubt many of you are gonna disable SMT just to gain a bit of extra performance in Final Fantasy 15 but at least note that if you wanted to you could the high quality settings which we believe enable all the game works features were a bit concerning stuttering was certainly an issue here even with the most extreme hardware configurations so some optimization work still needs to be done on that note AMD says they aren't going to release their optimized driver until next month when the game is officially released that said I'll likely still do some preliminary GPU testing shortly obviously I'm really keen to test the game in a bit more depth once it is fully released and hopefully we'll get a great deal of settings that can be tuned and tweaked for better results anyway that's going to do it for this one I hope you enjoyed the CPU performance preview and stay tuned for more content I'm your host Steve see you next time