Final Fantasy 16 Patch 1.33 Makes Us Think the Frame Rate Will Never Be Fixed on PS5

Didn't yoshi-p say that when the pc port is complete there gonna see if using code for it can help improve framerate on ps5 🤔

I'm going to be fairly unhappy if this is the norm. 60 fps needs to be available on base PS5. If it isn't, we're just going to go through this again with the next generation of consoles. We have consoles BECAUSE they're not PCs and we don't want to update them constantly.

I feel stupid buying the DLC assuming the frame rate would be fixed by now. While enjoying the game, playing this at launch gave me quite a bit of motion sickness to the point I couldn't play for more than an hour at a time (and this is coming from a VR enthusiast.)

It is classic situation. Whole PS5 is huge letdown and false advertisement. So I wonder this still bothers someone...

It was clear the framerate would never be fixed; it's been out for almost a year now. I do agree this is one game that could see tangible improvements on the PS5 Pro.

it's clear that is not a PS5 isse but more an engine/optimization one.
After Crystal Tools and Luminous Engine flop they're are still not capable of creating an engine

@Jayslow Control on the PS4 was horrible for me in that regard. Proper migraines. Folks here like to say that framerate doesn’t matter but when it’s slightly inconsistent, it can really mess your head up.

I finished FFXVI and i never noticed any intrusive FPS drops.
I did play in performance mode though.

People really exaggerate with this one.

At any rate, development has wrapped up on it. These small bug fix patches will probably end soon too.

You want to see what bad FPS is, go play pokemon on switch. 😅

The frame rate never bothered me in FF16. It's rock solid 60 fps during combat and never drops too low to where it's distracting outside of combat. I don't know, I'm happy with it. 🤷‍♂️

@djlard Funny, I’m quite satisfied with my PS5, not a “huge letdown and false advertisement” at all.

Definitely not a classic situation.

I played the entire game in Quality Mode - felt fine from start to finish.

Framerate will probably not get fixed as the game has to drop resolution down pretty low when combat is initiated - a resolution that could hinder exploration (which is why the resolution goes back up outside of combat).

Sure, a PS5 Pro could probably lock it to 60 (assuming it's a GPU issue), but I don't see Square Enix going back in and forcing the low-resolution for the entire game.

This is what happens when 30fps is your actual target for the game and you shoehorn a Performance Mode to prevent public flogging from the Twitter Mob.

Perhaps it will be fixed on the Xbox release.

I doubt this can be fixed, and I expect it will still be a mess on PC, too. The engine is flat out broken. Always has been. I have absolutely no idea what possessed them to repurpose the Luminous engine (while being cagey that they did) after they started using UE. It doesn't make sense. FFXIV is still, to this day a mess on high end PC on the same engine. It sells as a bench test to see how powerful hardware is if it can run it almost ok.

I'd bet Luminous still shares parts of Crystal Tools, which also, still is a mess, where even XIII can run, and not use any more than 50% of even a low end GPU or CPU, but somehow have frame drops into the 20s and 30s. XV can do ok if you throw 4090s at the problem and brute force it all. Horrible, horrible engines. This was supposed to be in UE. They changed because they didn't like the lighting. ??!?!.

It kills me they're about to trash XIV by adding a graphics overhaul where it was running beautify 60fps before.

@Nem Other way around, Performance mode has the horrendous drops into the 30s at times. Graphics mode is pretty even 30 but feels slow and sluggish. Sometimes it depends on the display. If you have an old/slow display it's hiding the problem by smearing things together so the choppiness isn't as jarring as a fast display.

@Alps_Stranger Sadly consoles that don't have an annual upgrade cycle like PCs will always behind after launch because devs keep designing games around the capabilities of the latest elite end PC hardware, which upgrades annually. Even if nobody even on Steam using hardware like that, and most are using something less than a PS5 (#1 GPU on Steam right now is a 3060 which is a bit below PS5.) It's an industry problem I'm still convinced is funded by AMD & Nvidia lining devs pockets to do so to justify their annual hardware.

@GamingFan4Lyf But, then, who designs 30fps as the target for a high speed character action game? Can't wait until the next Smash comes in at a "30-ish fps" target.

@dskatter I wouldn't call it a huge letdown either, as I'm not one to act as if games aren't perfectly playable at 30FPS.

But Sony did make some strong claims when they announced the PS5 that they've failed to deliver upon. It was touted as having butter-smooth 60 FPS as close to standard for major titles, 4K for many games and even 8K on occasion. The reality has been almost no solid 60FPS games in the AAA tier, even less 4K and no 8K whatsoever. The packaging is a good example of the walkback, it mentioned 8K initially and that has been recently removed. Sony definitely promised more than they delivered in terms of framerate and resolution.

@NEStalgia Hey, I get it. For this style of game, 60fps should have been the target. But it's pretty clear Square Enix wanted visual spectacle for this game over high framerates or it wouldn't have had such a rocky Performance Mode.

@glennthefrog Sony can't control what other studios do though. Their first party studios have shown that it's possible to deliver sublime looking games, with excellent image quality, at a flawless 60fps, sometimes even combined with rt reflections. We can't ask for more than that.

The whole 8k thing is one of the most ridiculous controversies I've ever seen in gaming. It's such a non-event that I have a hard time taking anyone who makes a big deal out of it seriously.

@Alps_Stranger "We have consoles BECAUSE they're not PCs and we don't want to update them constantly."

...except every 5-8 years lol? (Less than that if you double dip and get slim or pro models)

@GamingFan4Lyf Right, the TL;DR is Square did a Square. But really, the fail is the engine itself. They started building this game in UE, then reversed course and switched back to Luminous because they liked the visual effect of how it does lighting. Which would have been fine, if "lighting" wasn't a tradeoff for "functional behavior and acceptable performance." And I think 30fps is the target because Luminous (and before it, guaranteed sharing parts of it, Crystal Tools) has some significant bottlenecks that locks it to 30 even if it's not pushing the hardware at all.

Guaranteed, not even PC, not even Pro will save that wreck of an engine. Maybe it can brute force smooth 60 but guaranteed still at Game Boy resolutions.

@Ainu20 It's not so much whether 8K matters to many people, I don't even care about 4K personally, but it was advertised on the box and doesn't exist. That counts as false advertising whether we think it matters or not. It shouldn't have been mentioned at all.

@glennthefrog Technically, Sony could still release a firmware update to enable 8k output. They just won't, because no one owns an 8k set, no one produces 8k games, and no one truly cares.

@glennthefrog You’re not wrong, but Sony made those claims and then studios didn’t deliver.

Look at Sony’s first party titles. Ratchet and Clank. God of War. Horizon Zero Dawn. Last of Us. Gran Turismo. Spidey. Returnal. Those (mostly) live up to the hype.

Then look at third party devs and what they seem to be doing. It’s like Nintendo first party games and the Switch. The big N makes the hardware sing and dance with games like Mario Odyssey and such, and then third party devs…don’t.

Either way, I stand by my satisfaction with my trusty PS5. And I say this as a PS owner, a Switch owner and (for my sins) a Series X owner!

@8bitOG Yes, that is exactly what I mean. 5-8 years which is not "constant." And the pro models would be less than that which, if you read carefully, is what I'm criticizing.

@NEStalgia Yeah, that Luminous Engine has been a disaster and takes "brute forcing" to perform better.

It took the PS5/XSX in order for 'Lite' Mode on Final Fantasy XV to run at 60fps - and I don't think it's locked on either machine.

Sony studios do a great job with their proprietary engines having a nice visuals/performance ratio.

Nintendo does a great job with its proprietary engines having a nice visuals/performance ratio (given the hardware).

I don't think any Microsoft studio uses proprietary engines at all (well, there was the Slipspace Engine for Halo Infinite...but...yeah...anyways).

CDPR had the amazing RED Engine which was beautifully optimized for all kinds of hardware (especially at the end of Cyberpunk 2077 development). But, sadly, has abandoned it for Unreal Engine 5.

Remedy has the amazing Northlight Engine which has been truly impressive across platforms.

Capcom has done great with the RE Engine - even though it favors unlocked framerates which isn't the best for non-VRR displays.

UE5 is getting there. I think games that target 5.4 will allow greater flexibility on consoles since it will finally have a multi-threaded rendering pipeline which has shown great performance gains on mid to lower end PC hardware (as high-end PCs have just been able to brute-force single-threaded performance).

The problem is that, other than the HD-2D games that use Unreal Engine 4 and run great, Square Enix doesn't have the best handle on Unreal Engine either as Final Fantasy VII Rebirth isn't the "best case" of the engine.

I don't exactly have confidence that SE would have great-performing UE5 titles either.

My guess is the developers don't really have time to understand the engines and teams are just expected to deliver.

By contrast, studios like CDPR, The Coalition, etc. are actively working with Epic Support to fit their needs with UE5.

@Alps_Stranger Owning both myself, I fail to see how a PC needs more "constant" attention than a 5-8 year window

I'm waiting for the Pro to even start this game. Well I should note that I did start it actually, but noped out of it after seeing how horrendous the frame rate was. One of the worst performing "AAA" releases I've seen on PS5.

@GamingFan4Lyf And "Lite Mode" on XV on PS5/XSX somehow manages to need to run at such low resolution, with such low LOD that it looks like it's a PS3 game.

We don't know the dev history of Luminous, but we get insight into it if you read up on YoshiP's comments about Crystal Tools from when he took over XIV. It gives us a lot of insight as to just how messed up Squares priorities and methods can be and why these things turn out so badly.

Sony's definitely an interesting case. They design great in house engines, but they have all their main studios all doing their own engines. In a way that's the secret sauce of what makes their games stand out. In another way that's the secret sauce of why they're operating on 7% margin. They would have done a lot better having a "Sony Engine" their studios shared, I think. It may have made HZD and Uncharted 4 feel more samey, buy they could have really saved a ton of time and money that way too. Kind of the way Ubisoft has Anvil and Snowdrop both used for all their products (hey they samey design isn't on the engine, it's on the designers lol.)

Microsoft (now) certainly has their own engines. Yeah Slipspace is a nightmare. But they have Forzatech for the Forza and Fable games, they of course now have idTech, Creation for the BGS games (see also: Slipspace), that MMO engine the Zenimax games use, and of course Blizzard mostly does their own things. But yeah, they're using UE heavily for major projects. Though I expect Sony will be doing that more too, considering they invested into Epic specifically to have more input/priority in the engine.

Capcom has REengine, which at first seemed great, but it's starting to feel like a Square engine. They just can't get MHW to run well no matter what.

I REALLY don't know what CDPR is thinking. They had this amazing engine...and then they just scrapped it. I think it probably had to do with just the nightmare of getting it working across console generations etc, they probably didn't want to have to go through that nightmare again next gen, and deal with ARM coming up and all. Maybe it was the right call. Great engine for an extinct era.

UE5...IDK what's wrong with UE5. It was supposed to be amazing, but it's been one big disappointment. Although I remember the days when UE was always the bad one compared to idTech. idTech3's failings let UE get a leapfrog it, IMO, never deserved.

Honestly even the HD-2D games aren't well optimized in UE. I've been running OT2 & Triangle on the Legion and yeah, it runs, with decently high settings, at 60fps, but it pegs the GPU load at 89-93% for a game that doesn't look like it should. Meanwhile XIV using a branch of Luminous of all things only uses GPU in the 70's, to hold 60 and XIV using freaking Crystal Tools rarely goes over 50% (of course it also has frame drops into the 40's even with user mods to fix other problems, but that's not hardware bottlenecked, that's some weird game behavior, asset loading, or something else. Rebirth may not be a UE best case, true, but it's at least better than any of the Luminous/CT games performance-wise.

It's definitely not that the devs don't have time to understand the engines. I mean Forspoken was made by the team that made the engine. If they don't understand it, nobody does, and that's even worse (yes they got disbanded after that, and that's why we have a new problem with XVI. The engine team doesn't exist anymore so they're trying to reverse engineer it and fix it without knowing what they're doing.) Square has other problems in their process beyond understanding the engine (the story about the og FFXIV flower pots with more polygons than the player character models is my favorite trivia for understanding Square...)

@dskatter I can say if I stay to PS4 nothing major would be different.

@djlard A lot is different for me. Faster loading speeds, better graphics and frame rates, games that don’t exist on PS4…like the one mentioned in this article in the first place!

I guess if you only play cross-gen games, nothing would be different.

While a full 60 fps experience would have been preferable, I still enjoyed FF16 enough to get the platinum trophy and finish the DLCs on Final Fantasy mode. This entry ranks as one of my favorite in the series.

It's obvious that they won't try to fix performance by this point. If they could or wanted, they would've done this already, dude.

And i won't be buying another PS5. I'm fine with my base console and this game is still playable, so... whatever

@GamingFan4Lyf @glennthefrog
Actually, there are a lot like myself who find anything much less than 60fps to be unplayable (and i dont have a twitter account) - it affects some people much more than others - some can barely tell the difference between 30 and 60, whereas i can see a 5fps change anywhere up to about 90fps, and cannot tolerate much less than locked 60fps.

I gave up on this game when i saw the slideshow of a demo - what i remember though is (apart from some battles which looked good and ran at 60fps), the game didnt even look good at all - stellar blade is not that dissimilar in terms of scale/game type and looks much better at an almost rock solid 60fps.

What really bothers me is that Square will probably never add the weather change option and we'll have to accept that ugly purple tint.

@Rich33 Yeah gfx take a big hit in performance mode. More than is normal. I think the problem with that Luminous engine is, as the name suggests, it's all about the lighting design and shadows. And it does, at perfect settings, give a great look. I suspect they basically designed it to do what RT does before hardware RT was a thing. And as a result it kind of performs like RT....

@caiol92 LOL, yeah I hate that purple tint. I get that there's a story reason for it and it makes sense, but they build these large nice looking environments you see once or twice, and then spend the rest of the game going back there when it's covered in purple fog.

@Rich33 “ cannot tolerate much less than locked 60fps.”

Going to the movie theater must be torture.

@GamingFan4Lyf If you really believe watching film at 24fps is remotely equivalent then you need help.

@Rich33 @Pranwell What is the difference, if you don't mind me asking? I'm curious because I haven't been bothered by 30FPS or a framerate dip here and there. (And I did try googling the question, just with no success) Is it a vision thing , or that you've been gaming in the modern era so didn't build a tolerance for wonky framerate we suffered through in past eras?

I get it for competitive games with lag. But it sounds really bothersome to you even in single player.

@Pranwell Framerate is framerate. If a “low framerate” physically bothers you, than 24fps would physically bother you.

To call sub 60 a “slide show” must mean movies and TV are also slide shows.

I'm voting with my wallet and buying neither the DLC, nor Dragon Dogma 2

@Drago201 Well he did mention that if they find something while working on the PC port then they might be able to carry that over to the PS5. But that was "if" and "Maybe" so I wouldn't keep my hope up for it.

Since it was developed to be a 30 FPS game, I had no issues playing it at that frame rate. It's extremely smooth for a 30 FPS game. The only issue I had initially was not being able to turn off the incredibly heavy handed motion blur, but at least they added that option eventually.

It is amazing though how Square Enix has now failed at a performance mode for each of their PS5 exclusive games. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth takes a big graphical hit if you play it in that mode, and it was never fixed. 16 obviously also had issues right out of the gate. The PS5 version of Final Fantasy VII Remake had none of these issues and that's just a cross-gen game.

@glennthefrog
Its a good question.
As the framerate goes much below 60, even if the game is slow moving, the image goes from smoothish (to be perfectly smooth I need an image around 90-100fps, but I can enjoy 60 just fine), to literally looking like a slideshow where i see the image with much less clarity (a bit like blur but not quite), and i can see the distance skip between frames for moving objects.
If I persevere (or there are frame pacing issues /uneven/fast changing framerates) my eyes/brain do not adjust and i get headaches and severe motion sickness.
At around 30fps i see the distance skips more noticeably than the image itself and it really messes with my head.
VRR can help a bit, but is not a magic wand (except where it is used to 'unlock' framerates in excess of 60 on 120hz VRR mode).

Motion blur also gives me the same headaches and motion sickness.

To be honest I have had problems with framerates for a long time - since at least 2016 (and possibly all the way back to 2011, before which I was using CRT TVs).
I found just by trying them that Performance modes on PS4 Pro could help, but there were a couple of years I started playing games much less around then because of the problem.

One thing I will say (and this I have found to be very, very common) is that whilst i knew i had an issue with games and i learned performance modes could help, to start with i didnt know that it was framerates that were responsible (I have always been console rather than PC), and wasnt really educated to what they were and how they worked.
Through experience and general education which became much more mainstream, I now know a lot more, including the fact I can see even small changes including positive ones (well) beyond 60 - to be clear I think I have seen them for years, but didnt have the knowledge or experience to know/enumerate what I was seeing.

It is also true though that people see images as very smooth at varying framerates - what becomes irritating to me, is that just because some people cant see much difference between 30 and 60 (and i know this can be very true), a small often loud number of these people think/push the opinion that no one else can, and cant appreciate the affect it has on others. The poll they ran here a while ago proved this is a much more common problem than a lot of people think - and that doesnt account for people who have issues but dont know the reason (like myself a few years ago).

Over the years I have become more intolerant to framerates much lower than 60, or frame pacing/uneven/fast changing framerates.

The main reasons (for my increased intolerance) I think are:
How newer TVs work (this has definitely had an affect)
Age (maybe)
Having had 3 good years of playing games at 60 or higher.

The only game I have bought recently(ish) with issues was jedi survivor and i had to leave it until after the patch removing ray tracing, even then i could still see some issues - since then I now look for demos or analysis / detailed enough reviews before I buy/pre-order unless its released by the better Sony studios. Literally, I dont care how good a game is by other metrics - if framerates arent good enough it might as well be a 0 out of 10.

I hope this helps - explaining it sometimes is not easy for me.

@GamingFan4Lyf
The way movies/TV present and move mean that generally much lower framerates are tolerable.
Someone else may be able to explain much better, but 1 key aspect is that you are not controlling the image (my tolerance for game cutscenes is much higher for instance, and 30fps cutscenes in 60fps games are not always intolerable, bad but not intolerable). It is also true however, that in someway the image is just built differently.
That said I have seen a few movies in recent years which have affected me - one was one of the marvel films (cant remember which now and i dont often rewatch), that I had to stop watching.

Well if the pros going to have the same cpu as the ps5 its not going to solve the framerate issue unfortunately

@NEStalgia
I lose track of what engine is used for what tbh! Lol.
But you are quite right that the engine for this game was just not fit for purpose. In fact i cant remember square using an engine that i have been impressed with for a long time?!
I think you made reference in other posts (apologies if it wasnt you) to various engines used by Sony studios and other 3rd parties, and even if you just consider engines that do achieve 60(+)fps, there is such a massive image quality difference between them, even when games are not doing anything too different.
Sony's tend to be the absolute cream of the crop, but I also really liked what hogwarts legacy used (modified UE4?). Stellar blade too used a very good engine which to me allowed for a very good image quality - though 1 big thing here was that they clearly opted to design for the 60fps modes.
On the other hand Jedi survivor (post ray tracing removal) still looked quite bad to me.

@Bettyswollocks
Very much depends - some games/engines bottleneck on the GPU, some on the CPU - i think the major bottleneck on UE5 has been found to be the GPU. And some bottleneck even with low useage on both due to poor utilisation of cores/compute units.

Funnily enough, even if games bottleneck on CPU, often (not always) this only happens during periods of heavy loading/streaming (Elden Ring im sure is a good example).
This shouldnt cause a big problem for PS5, due to the extra tech inside to take work off the CPU in this case (as per Cerny's detailed presentation) - however.. devs actually have to use this tech for the game to benefit, and this doesnt always happen particularly in the case of non-exclusives.

@Rich33 “That said I have seen a few movies in recent years which have affected me - one was one of the marvel films (cant remember which now and i dont often rewatch), that I had to stop watching.”

Yeesh, that actually sounds awful to deal with!

While not vision related, I can’t ride thrill rides anymore as they make me dizzy. I don’t have any brain issues, but it can happen as one ages. It sucks because I loved riding rollercoasters with my daughter.

@dskatter I bought maybe 10 PS5 games and 8 of them was a junk. I had a really bad hand or there is something wrong...

@Bentleyma we can't be 100% sure because they've kinda if intentionally dodged the question (which is probably confirmation enough.). He said only that is was a well established engine and it's not a licensed engine credited. But then he said it's a "new" engine for the game.

Realistically it's likely all true. It's probably a fork of luminous the same way Bethesda forked Creation off Gamebryo. Is it's own engine that's not gamebryo but under the hood it's still ganebryo warts and all. The visual and performance hallmarks of luminous are all over xiv. And the won't say what it is plainly. So probably a "new" engine based on the steaming pile (xiv is it's own engine that shares design with luminous but it's built for online and actually runs smooth 60fps at 4k.... 😂)

@GamingFan4Lyf
I think in this case (if I recall correctly) the films included lots of unusual camera panning.
My belief is that just like with games, there are a lot more susceptible, its just people do not understand it - and people are only recently getting more educated about game framerates due to wider audiences now watching / reading things like digital foundry.
Couple that with it becoming more of a problem with newer (bigger?) TVs.

@Rich33 Perhaps.

Definitely never heard about it back in the 90's when Star Fox ran at a whopping...what...15fps (almost a literal slide show)?? Ocarina of Time I believe ran at like 25fps??

Heck, during the 360/PS3 era there was a ton of 30fps games - with horrendous screen tearing (which I am incredibly sensitive to). All major PS4 exclusives ran at 30fps on the base machine, and no one complained.

Which is why when most people say "anything less than 60 is unbearable", I roll my eyes simply because...well...60fps hasn't been common for a while in the console space until recently.

The PS2 had a ton of 60fps games, but that was the only console generation where it was pretty common for quite some time.

As much as I love Digital Foundry analysis (because I am technology buff), I do think their analysis has put things to the forefront that shouldn't matter as anything more than curiosity - and throws a ton of fuel on the "console wars".

@Rich33 That was an excellent explanation, I really appreciate it. It sheds light on the problem from the perspective of someone experiencing it, which is always interesting to read.

I see so much discussion about how FPS can make a game unplayable but haven't known anyone personally who felt this way except in a strictly snobbish sense (I paid for this great rig, why is it not 60FPS locked?!?). Now I understand why it's such a vital issue to people like you. Thanks for broadening my perspective

@glennthefrog
Not a problem at all.

You are quite correct in that some WANT 60fps, and others NEED it, which complicates matters.

One of the main issues though I think is that you have certain "opinions":

1. Some who can tolerate low fps and just dont (and some that sadly wont) understand how it can be such a problem, and a continually inceasing problem - as I said I know that newer TVs are inceasingly exasperating it (I was 100% fine with CRTs) but there are also other factors. Also I hear all the time that fps wasnt an issue before Digital Foundry... It was, people (myself included) just didnt know enough to know what the issues were.

2. Some of the people with low/no tolerance for under 60fps dont understand and sadly sometimes dont/wont believe that others cannot see major differences above a certain fps which is sometimes as low as 30.

3. Some with low/no tolerance for under 60fps do not know that this is the cause of why 'the game' looks bad or gives them a headache etc.

NB i have no idea why 60fps is the sweet spot so to say - I would prefer if all games run above 90-100fps and can easily tell the difference up to this point, but can tolerate down to just below 60 (60 is perfectly comfortable) - this is oddly common.

Current gen consoles are easily equipped to run any game at 60fps providing devs keep their ambitions in check, utilise the hardware properly with appropriate engines (consoles are not mega powerful PCs), program primarily for 60fps, and publishers dont rush the games out preventing full optimisation - unfortunately this doesnt always happen...
When it does we get games like SMMM, GOWR, Hogwarts Legacy (post summer 23 patch), R&C, SM2, (not a complete list) which can all run above 70fps most/all of the time (even with RT in insomniac games cases), up to 90 or even 100fps for some of those earlier on the list.