I love Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, but its authentic kind on PS5 had main technical points. The PS5 Pro offers a better expertise, sharpening the picture with improved upscaling within the efficiency mode, but it’s nonetheless removed from its final kind. That’s what we’re presupposed to get with its PC port.
I booted up the PC port with trepidation, because the earlier recreation’s debut on PC had its justifiable share of points. Fortunately, Rebirth is a a lot better expertise, with sufficient choices to fulfill PC avid gamers, although it may nonetheless be better.
You’re greeted with a well-recognized display screen for shader compilation the primary time you boot it, and for essentially the most half, it really works. There are nonetheless some stutters when traversing the open world, but they’re not immersion-breaking.
We’ll get to the efficiency, but some choices nonetheless baffle me. Not having the ability to open the settings menu whereas in a cutscene is a silly, console-centric resolution that gained’t fly with PC avid gamers. I’d usually discover myself caught in a protracted cutscene with imperfect efficiency after altering some graphical settings for benchmarking functions, and never having the ability to change them proper there could be irritating.
Other than these, the sport runs effectively. Mouse and keyboard assist is better than anticipated, so it is by no means awkward controlling Cloud and others utilizing the brand new enter. However, enter mapping for mini-games like taking part in the piano is hilariously complicated. Switching characters feels bizarre utilizing the arrow keys, as does fixing puzzles, but such grievances might be remedied by customizing the keyboard mapping in settings.
Fortunately, the sport’s efficiency and picture high quality are nice, leagues above what the PS5 may muster. I performed FF7 Rebirth on a PC with the next specs:
Playing on a 1440p monitor, I may run the sport above 100fps more often than not with each graphical possibility set to its highest degree. This doesn’t embrace any upscaling. Turning on DLSS provides you with a lift, but there isn’t a possibility for body technology, which is the precise name. FF7 Rebirth on PC is restricted to 120fps, and it’s not too exhausting to hit that wall with the precise choices.
The “High” preset activates DLSS in “Balanced” mode, rendering the sport barely above half the output decision. At 1440p and 4K, that appears tremendous but it’s not best for these operating a 1080p monitor.
Here are the efficiency benchmarks when exploring the grasslands and Junon throughout numerous resolutions:
At 4K, going from the bottom to the extremely preset resulted in a 38% efficiency loss. If you will have a GPU that may deal with increased resolutions than your monitor, it might be tough to make use of that further energy. You can’t change the sport’s output decision within the full-screen mode, and also you’ll have to alter the show decision in Windows for the sport to acknowledge it.
I set my monitor’s decision to 4K and adjusted the sport’s scaling to windowed mode, leaving an unsightly line on the highest and aspect of the show. Changing that to the full-screen mode would outcome within the recreation getting confused about resolutions, so I couldn’t render the sport at a better decision for elevated sharpness with out bizarre artifacts.
FF7 Rebirth is officially Steam Deck verified, and the default efficiency is appropriate, if not best. The recreation leans closely on upscaling via TAAU on Valve’s handheld, which turns the sport’s visuals right into a blurry smear fest when roaming via the wilds.
The recreation’s default settings on Steam Deck are near optimum. The “Medium” preset hovers round 25fps, getting as much as 30 with a number of tweaks. The “Low” preset goals for 40fps, although heavy areas just like the swamp can drop it to the mid-30s. The best resolution is to make use of a mixture of settings and goal a locked 30/40fps with v-sync.
The inclusion of AMD’s FSR and Intel’s XeSS options for upscaling would’ve been welcome, but Epic’s present TAAU will get the job finished, usually better than DLSS. At decrease inner resolutions, TAAU ends in a sharper picture whereas providing better efficiency.
At the time of writing, the in-game body charge lock doesn’t lead to evenly paced body occasions, so that you’ll should depend on exterior choices like Rivatuner on PC or altering the refresh charge on Steam Deck to get a constant expertise.
The greatest a part of the brand new port is the potential for all of the upcoming mods. All of my complaints might be fastened by the group via mods, though Square Enix ought to deal with them instantly first.
Overall, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth appears and runs better than its PS5 counterpart on PC. The quantity of choices and scalability is sufficient to fulfill most PC avid gamers with trendy {hardware}, and sure quirks might be fastened with fast updates.
