That seems weird for a open source project though there's only so much that can be done without the game getting patched by the devs directly so SK isn't required or anything.
I'm reluctant to try them out too. Anyway, with your settings I did get improved performance which is much closer to locked 60fps. In battles I still get dips but it seems to vary greatly depending on what happens and how the camera is behaving. For example I landed some kind of strike on the ground with the 2H sword which sent dust flying everywhere and at that moment the camera was close to this cloud and the FPS tanked. Genrally speaking, roaming in the world and driving was at 60fps 98% of the time. The setting that gave the biggest boost is Filtering. The FPS difference between Highest, and High is pretty much nil, there is a slight gain at Average and then a big jump to Low. I'm trying to spot the differences between Highest and Low but haven't found anything yet. Lowering Lightning from Highest to High can in some cases give a slight boost (like 1fps). Geometry also seems to be case by case but overall the gain from leaving it Off is small. You also use FXAA but honestly I see absolutely no difference whatsoever between AA Off and FXAA enabled. The aliasing is 100% present with FXAA. What really does a big IQ difference is TAA, but that setting is too demanding. People have been complaining on RAM usage but mine stays at around 8500-8800MB and doesn't increase. I experience a few hitches here and there but it's nothing major. Oh and I also noticed that rain has an impact on FPS (about 5fps).
Oh, I had no idea they were sloppy with the protection twice >.< At this point, they should just remove the DRM and place the game on Gog for player goodwill. But speaking of the FFXV steamdb.info, it's kinda nice to see them updating builds daily - moving them to QA and in the end, release to the public. Shows they're working on it, so that is something at least. Looking at the Items tab registered for the game on Steamdb. I'm not sure if those are micro transactions incoming or steam workshop stuff..
I've been using the SpecialK mod with this game for the last two days but I can't honestly say that I've noticed any difference in performance over the non-modded version. For me, this game seems to run best when the framerate is capped at 30 fps (perhaps due to it being developed for consoles first?) with everything completely maxed out. This seems to reduce the stuttering significantly in my experience and since I'm playing the game with an Xbox One Elite controller anyway the lower framerate really isn't that bad once I got used to it. It feels on a par with the PS4 Pro version but obviously looks far, far nicer, especially with resolution rendering set to 150% at 2560x1440. For whatever reason, G-SYNC doesn't seem to help with the huge variations in framerates - 70-90 fps in the wilderness and 35-45 fps in the populated areas and towns when maxed out at 2560x1440 with 100% Resolution scaling. Capping the framerate using RTSS to 120 fps and setting the in-game framerate to 30 fps seems to give me the smoothest performance. There are still some occasional stutters but whereas with 60 fps and 120 fps it will not only feel laggier as the framerate drops but the stutters seem more prevailent despite the game being installed to my 1 TB Samsung EVO 850 SSD (where the load times are nice and fast!). Cap to 30 fps and the controller response feels more consistent and the game is 99.99% stutter-free. I played it for hours this way and while 60 fps is preferable, I am unable to get a locked framerate without lowering settings. Once you start turning off the NVIDIA effects and lowering settings then the game looks more like the PS4 Pro version. Admittedly the console version looks nice but once I saw the PC version running fully maxed out then it's hard to settle for anything less. I believe Digital Foundry are due to release another video on the PC version of FFXV shortly, focusing on the performance (they've already released one that covered the visual settings vs. consoles). Maybe that will have some useful tips on how to get the game looking great while still having 60 fps on PCs like mine? While I enjoyed the PS4 version, I did not play it for more than 12-13 hours before I was playing the next big thing and thus forgot about it. I have played over 40 hours of the PC game so far to Chapter 9 and I absolutely love the game despite the thread-bare storyline. The setting and open-world exploration is really fun and there is a ton of stuff to see and do. Encountered a level 99 monster last night that was (not to spoil too much) absolutely enormous and that was a real WOW! moment for me. A really great game IMO that manages to feel just that bit different from all the other fantasy-based Final Fantasy games by virtue of its setting and the introduction of modern things like cars and mobile phones.
Do you really think the nVidia effects bring anything major to the table? Turf is just a different type of grass and isn't necessarily better. Fur does add something "fur sure" (lol) but just on selected enemies thus a very small part of the game. Shadow - I don't see the difference with it enabled, do you? VXAO, I've not tested this enough to give an opinion since it's such an FPS hog. For me the biggest difference between the PC version and PS4 Pro is the resolution. 4K with High-res textures is so damn beautiful to look at. 60fps is also a must for me since the choppy 30-40fps I got in the PS4 version wasn't pleasant (although I did get used to it in the end). I'll try 1080p/60fps on my 4K TV with everything maxed to see how it looks but I fear it won't be pretty. I think that @kx11 settings are great and provide a 60fps experience 97% of the time which is good enough for me. I do wish it was possible to add TAA though since even at 4K you still see the aliasing.
Also if you want to boost grass without having the 4k assets you can force the high assets on and even without textures it improves grass density,
As you can see in the FFXV video with OSD, I’m mostly getting fps in the 50’s, low 60’s. That’s 1080P, 150 resolution scale and all game works on. Haven’t encountered any significant stuttering (up to chapter 3) so leaving graphics as is for now. Yes, look at the 10GB of vram being used. Think the game is simply requesting it all at my settings. Steve Burke mentioned the amount of memory used depends on how much the game is allowed to request based on TRAM settings. Look at the significant graphics/detail being rendered in the Windows version of the game. Believe Gamers Nexus also mentioned basically PC average graphic settings match console (xbox) best settings. Enjoying it so far.
After 54 hours playing this game, I'm still on chapter 9 having decided to take a break from the story (what there is of it!) in order to do some of the side quests. While some of these are entertaining, many of them aren't and just feel like filler until those of, say, The Witcher 3 where the main quests and side quests are all of a high quality such that it feels like there is no distinction between them at all. I've noticed that no matter how many side quests you do for the various NPCs that they always have another to give to you once it is completed so completionists are going to get a bit frustrated at that. I've found a quick way to earn XP and money (gil) is to keep a stock of Repair items and help out the motorists with broken down cars that are scattered around the map (I say motorists but the male NPC looks suspiciously like the same person and is always wearing shorts albeit different coloured ones!). You can get as much as 1,500 XP plus 6,000 gil for just a few seconds work! Feels almost like cheating! Still, playing around with different settings to get a stutter-free experience. Currently, trying a 60 FPS cap with 100% Resolution scaling and everything maxed out except Motion Blur and NVIDIA VXAO set to OFF. While the game does not hold a locked 60 fps, especially during combat and car travel, it does manage to feel smooth, much smoother than, say, with a 120 FPS framerate limit. There's the odd streaming stutter here and there but it's a 99.99% enjoyable experience. Not sure having VXAO on makes that much difference to the visuals during actual play and it does seem to incur a noticeable performance hit. Drops to 35-45 FPS with it enabled also feel oddly more laggy than if I cap the framerate to 30 FPS. Not sure why as G-SYNC seems to be working as indicated by the Special K mod I'm using to reduce API overhead. There's the odd moment in the game where the game engine halts for half a second then amusing speeds up for the same length of time in order to catch up but this is fairly rare and seems to be a streaming bottleneck (which I shouldn't really be having as I'm playing the game from an SSD). One oddity with the 60 FPS framerate cap which I have set in both RTSS and the Special K mod with the in-game Framerate set to 60 is that I am seeing framerates actually exceed 60 FPS, albeit briefly, on a fairly regular basis. I'm not sure why as I have never seen this behaviour in any other game. Maybe there's some kind of bug in the engine with the 60 FPS setting as it doesn't seem to happen if I cap it at 30 FPS. Anyone else experienced this?
Is there anyone playing at native 4K? One thing that bothers me extremely much is the damn water! As soon as I get near a body of water my FPS tanks (like -20fps @ 4K) and the GPU load maxes out at 100% but if I look away from the water the FPS goes up again and GPU load goes down. This of course impacts fishing and it's interesting that during fishing I see 40-45fps but soon as Noct catches a fish and that animation plays, the camera changes angle to him, his fish and the sky...meaning the FPS hops back up again. I tried this at 1080p but the problem isn't there, even with everything maxed out (including all nVidia effects). Another thing is how it's possible that TAA blurs the scene so much at 1080p compared to 4K. Huge difference in IQ! Last question is a game related one - I remember from my PS4 playthrough that you should mind what you sell. Some of the treasures you find serve as upgrades to weapons but also some kind of tilling in the last part of the game?
Yeah SSR or screen-space reflections. Probably using 1/1 the display resolution for the reflections which works pretty well for 1920x1080 and 2560x1440 depending on the GPU but then becomes more demanding at 3200x1800 (Mostly downsampling.) and full 3840x2160 and beyond. TAA probably has a similar issue but also with more pixels it just works better whether it's native or downsampling so it avoids the strong blurriness when you go above 1920x1080
You don't happen to know a way of editing that in the INI? Or even turn it off? It will be bad news later in the game where you come to areas which are almost completely submerged. Edit - Looks like it's the "Lightning" option, I'll tinker with it today.
Unfortunately not, I don't think any of the available settings cover water unless the screen effects option somehow controls SSR quality but I don't think it does. Water itself is just a flat plane with a shader effect over it far as I can tell but I don't think it can be customized at all so it's using reflections and a few other effects plus if temporal AA is enabled it also works with the water shader from what I can tell. Games such as Battlefield on Frostbite make use of temporal reflections and using previous frames as a form of optimization though the downside to this is ghosting and noise whereas I don't think this game uses anything like that though there is some error correction for obstructing objects but this is pretty simple so it glitches easily.
Looks like it's the Lightning option after all. Here's what it does: Highest, High, Average : Full reflection of water and big FPS hit. Low : Reflection disabled except objects that are very near. Massive FPS boost! What's interesting is that I see no visual difference between Highest, High and Average and there is no difference in FPS (@4K).
That's interesting, I would have expected that to affect global illumination and light source visibility distance not water and related properties. I suppose it's similar to shadows affecting both distance and quality or the scene effects having control over most of the post-process settings in the game then.
I haven't done any extensive testing to what the Lightning option does (other than my water test) but your thoughts are sound. I really hope they'll patch the game soon and fix some of those things. Also, isn't it strange that nVidia hasn't released a performance guide on their website?
Don't know if you have tried the NV Experience, it actually have much better description of what each option does. Kind of similar to the performance guide. Weird that NV do a better job in describing the option than SE.
So, figured screw it. Downloaded the demo to see if I'd be interested. No sound. I read around and found a few suggestions on fixing it, but, in end... just uninstalled the demo and... in a different way, said screw it.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/637650/announcements/detail/1665643240471790756 Kooky would be this. https://steamcommunity.com/games/637650/announcements/detail/1665643240471710200
