Final Fantasy: every PlayStation 5 game tested on PS5 Pro - with some impressive results
Only Rebirth gets a Pro patch - but many FF titles benefit from Game Boost.
PlayStation and Final Fantasy have been closely linked for nearly the entire history of Sony’s console efforts. 1997's Final Fantasy 7 was a touchstone in storytelling and computer graphics on PS1, and nearly every single mainline Final Fantasy game since then has made its console debut exclusively on a PlayStation system. That close relationship extends to Sony's PS5 Pro, as this year's Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth has been overhauled for the new enhanced system. Plus, Game Boost should provide a bonus to older Final Fantasy software, even games that haven’t been formally enhanced for PS5 Pro. So exactly how does Rebirth fare on PS5 Pro? And can the PS5 Pro overcome frame-rate limitations in Final Fantasy 14 and 16?
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is widely acclaimed, but is also well known for substantial image quality woes. The game suffered from softer-than-usual imagery on a 4K screen, especially in performance mode, making for a somewhat unsatisfying 60fps experience. That's not really a concern on PS5 Pro. In stills, the clarity difference is pretty enormous. We're going from an image that appears quite 1080p-like - despite technically usually running a somewhat higher res - to a crisp, sharp 4K resolve on Pro. On a 4K set sitting from a normal viewing distance, the old performance mode looked obviously soft and lacking detail, while PS5 Pro is razor sharp, at least by the standards of modern temporal AA techniques.
A lot of this was obvious in the pre-launch preview we conducted a couple months ago - but it's especially clear in the final game. When you can actually sit down and examine shots closely, you get a great sense of the benefits of PS5 Pro in this title. Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth presents large, sprawling environments, and the base console just didn't do a good job of resolving distant detail effectively.
Pixel counts show a mild Pro advantage, but that's not particularly relevant: the new console is using Sony's new PSSR upsampling technique to hit a full 4K resolution, while the base machine is using Unreal Engine's TAA with just a naive upscale to 4K. That means that the Pro is actually resolving 4K-like detail despite its typically sub-native pixel count. The game looks pretty solid in motion as well, clearly resolving extra detail. That said, it's not flawless, with some sub-pixel shimmer and moire patterns on some surfaces.
Those issues also appear to some degree on the base machine, so the fact that PSSR isn't free of problems isn't really a strike against it comparatively - but there are some issues that seem to emerge just on PS5 Pro. The foliage, for instance, has some odd scanline-like patterns at a distance on Pro. At closer ranges, it can sometimes blur excessively, with a kind of accumulation smear trailing behind. Additionally, the image at rest can appear slightly unstable, with a kind of PSSR noise that we've come to expect in a lot of titles that use the technique.
The biggest criticism is that Square-Enix hasn't touched graphical issues inherent to the game itself. The key issue comes down to draw distance, as pop-in for elements like bushes and ground clutter can be quite severe and it's a near-constant issue in most natural environments. That makes that Rebirth would look a bit unstable in these scenes even with perfect anti-aliasing treatment. PSSR actually makes the issue a bit more pronounced, because you have a clearer view of the bits of foliage and model detail that are updating to more detailed variants. The game's documented lighting and texture work issues are unchanged as well, as are all other major visual settings.
Overall, it's definitely a big improvement over the performance mode, and produces a suitably detailed image for a 4K television set. The stability of the anti-aliasing treatment is also generally acceptable, if well short of the kind of pristine images we've seen out of the Horizon PS5 Pro patches, for instance. It also falls somewhat short of the old graphics mode. The higher internal resolution - which is usually at or around 4K - produces a pretty clean result with TAA. Graphics mode is generally free of visual gremlins like problems with foliage, or issues with shimmer or noise. In a few specific areas, the graphics mode produces a substantially better result.
But the PSSR-powered PS5 Pro does produce a clearer, sharper image, both at rest and in motion. The game's old TAA tended to blur the game a little bit excessively, even at 4K resolution, which isn’t a problem with PSSR. There are definite tradeoffs then, although I'd give the nod to the graphics mode in aggregate. Everything I've said so far only applies to the PS5 Pro's versatility mode, which is the new mode option enabled on PS5 Pro. But the old modes are still available on Pro. A quick comparison suggests they are substantially similar to the same modes on base PS5, without large visual changes.
I do think Square-Enix's naming conventions are a bit odd here and there's little suggestion in-game to indicate that the versatility mode is the preferred option for PS5 Pro. The in-game descriptions could certainly be better, or they could nudge the player towards the mode using a start-up prompt like Naughty Dog does for their Last of Us titles. Alternatively, cutting the other mode options out of the PS5 Pro code would also be reasonable, as the old modes are clearly worse in my opinion.
That's because the versatility mode manages to pull off an essentially locked 60fps, in addition to its generally good image quality. I tested the game in a variety of stressful encounters and it rarely dropped a frame, outside of the occasional missed frame on camera cuts. I did manage to provoke a few brief dips in this boss fight, but elsewhere the game seemed like a locked 60fps. Of course, Rebirth is a huge game and I don't have time to test everything, but I do feel like performance is generally very strong. In essence then, the versatility mode addresses image quality concerns with better upscaling. It's the best way to play - until the PC version lands, at least.
Final Fantasy 16 is next up, Square-Enix's 2023 action-RPG epic. Technically, this isn't actually a PS5 Pro enhanced game, but Game Boost produces some compelling results. A quick side-by-side reveals considerably more detail on PS5 Pro, in both the frame-rate and graphics modes. FF16's TSCMAA and FSR 1 combination actually leaves a lot of the underlying pixel structure of the image intact, so we can make out less aliasing on Pro. Certain fine details resolve more clearly in the final frame. Internal resolutions appear to be higher on Pro, unsurprisingly, though the difference tends to be larger in the graphics mode than in performance mode. FF16 would probably benefit from a technique like FSR 2 or PSSR, but the Pro at least gives us more samples effectively to work with to produce a less aliased image.
In performance terms, the Pro actually delivers a considerably better visual experience and I noted frame-rate uplifts in the region of 24 percent. Sometimes this just means a frame-rate that is a bit higher, typically at least sitting within the Pro's VRR window, but a lot of the time this means 60fps or close to it, while the base machine is struggling a little. The graphics mode remains at 30fps however, just like PS5. Overall it's a nice little upgrade, especially in frame-rate mode where the performance could flag a little bit before.
Up next is Final Fantasy 14, which again runs boosted - but not formally enhanced - on PS5 Pro. Interestingly, running at native 4K there are some of the largest Pro boosts we've seen so far, running up to about 40 percent faster than the base console across these scenes. It's enough to bring the game to a reasonably consistent 60fps in a lot of game content at 60Hz output, which wasn't the case before. It takes relatively heavy loads - like the lower decks of Limsa Lominsa - before we start seeing consistently sub-60 readings at full 4K.
At a lower 1440p resolution, the Pro notches pretty substantial wins here, clocking in about 32 percent faster when not vsync limited. The level of image fluidity we can get out of the Pro - while still at a perfectly reasonable 1440p res - is quite impressive, at least when VRR is enabled. It's certainly an enormous improvement from my first point of contact with this game, when I played it in 2013 on a launch-era PS3 console!
Finally we have Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin, which is technically a Final Fantasy game too. On PS5 in performance mode, it targets 60fps but has a habit of dropping frames fairly often, often dipping to the 50s and sometimes lower during combat encounters. The resolution mode is actually pretty similar, taking dips in the same instances, though the drops are larger. The performance mode comes in at roughly 1440p, and curiously the resolution mode clocked in at the same 1440p pixel count in my tests, though it's possible dynamic res may be in play. I think the checkerboard technique Team Ninja employed in the launch version of the game has been dropped here, but there still isn't effective TAA and the image looks pretty messy.
On PS5 Pro, those performance drops are a lot less frequent and impact the game less substantially. Stranger of Paradise actually delivers a semi-credible 60fps update on Pro, which is a solid upgrade, considering how the base console struggled. Both modes feel fairly similar here in my experience. Again, there's no formal Pro enhancement to take advantage of, but the GPU enhancement is delivering some reasonably good results.
There are two other PS5-native Final Fantasy games as well - Crisis Core Reunion and Final Fantasy 7 Remake. These games ran with pretty impeccable performance originally on PS5 with relatively high rendering resolutions, so there's no urgent need for a Pro boost. But they do employ dynamic resolution setups, so it's likely they run with somewhat less aggressive DRS on Pro.
PS4 titles don't seem to get a dramatic frame-rate boost from PS5 Pro in particular, so the outcomes in games like Final Fantasy 15 and 12 seem similar to the base PS5 and as expected, the Pro doesn't do anything to fix the incorrect frame pacing in FF15 either.
So, ultimately, the PS5 Pro's Final Fantasy improvements are mostly isolated to the four games I highlighted up-front. Rebirth obviously gets the best of the lot, with an excellent Pro patch offering a compelling 4K60 gameplay mode. FF16 gets a welcome mix of resolution bumps and frame-rate enhancements, FF14 runs quite a lot faster than the base machine, and Stranger of Paradise gives a more convincing 60fps lock. Looking forward, I'd love to see an actual FF16 patch if at all possible. Dropping TSCMAA in favour of FSR 2 or PSSR would be a win and there's probably a lot of headroom to push image quality on PS5 Pro. If Square-Enix revisits the game for release on other platforms, maybe they could take another look at the PS5 code. But even with just one proper Pro patch, I think the PS5 Pro presents compelling upgrades over the base platform for Final Fantasy titles. It’s a surprisingly strong showing for Square-Enix's flagship fantasy franchise.