Earlier today, Square Enix released the Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail benchmark. This is par for the course, as the Japanese company has always released benchmarks whenever a new expansion for the popular MMORPG was about to launch.
However, this one is particularly interesting because Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail is set to introduce several graphics improvements as well as the upscalers AMD FSR 1.0 and NVIDIA DLSS 2.0. Moreover, the system requirements have been slightly increased.
Let’s start with the graphics improvements. The game now supports dynamic interaction with grass as characters walk through it, denser and more detailed foliage, greatly improved ground textures, improved shadow resolution and the addition of soft shadows, enhanced reflectivity for metals and wet surfaces, improved character models (especially their skin), increased polygon count for objects, and even wave simulation. The graphics enhancements are clearly visible during the benchmark run.
Square Enix also added a new anti-aliasing option called TSCMAA, or Temporally Stable Conservative Morphological Anti-Aliasing. Intel originally developed TSCMAA as an alternative to MSAA in virtual reality applications.
Of course, TSCMAA cannot be used in conjunction with NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR, so you’ll have to make a choice in that regard. Unfortunately, the implementation of the upscaler doesn’t offer users the ability to switch between the usual performance, balanced, and quality presets.
Users are instead offered a ‘frame rate threshold’ setting, which presents the following options:
- Always On
- Activate when the frame rate goes below 30 FPS
- Activate when the frame rate goes below 60 FPS
However, there are already reports of users able to tweak the preset and even force DLAA with SpecialK or DLSSTweaks.
Anyway, with DLSS set to Always On and graphics settings set to maximum at 4K resolution, my PC (AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D, GeForce RTX 4090, 32GB DDR5 RAM) scored 25646 points, with an average frame rate of 174,2 FPS and a minimum frame rate of 97. This is without the ShadowPlay performance hit of the captured video, which shows a slightly lower score of 23674 (161 average FPS, 90 minimum FPS).
As a reminder, Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail will be released on July 2 for PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S|X. The expansion could have launched sooner, but Square Enix admitted it chose this date to allow players enough time to play the upcoming Elden Ring expansion (slated for June 21).
