We were anticipating the release of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth on PC with both anticipation and trepidation. On the one hand, this is a simply stunning game – albeit one that could stand to benefit from a wealth of improvements the PC platform could provide. On the other hand, this port follows in the wake of a truly awful PC rendition of Final Fantasy 7 Remake, which Square-Enix has essentially left to rot since the last window. So, what’s the score with Rebirth? Well, it is an improved port over Remake, for sure. One of the key problems with the PS5 version is addressed too, but even so, there are problems of various severity across the board. Ultimately, it should be a whole lot better than it is.
Let’s start by talking about the user experience from a settings and menu perspective. There’s huge scope for improvement here, starting with the presentation. This menu offers users no indication whatsoever of what the settings do or what the performance cost for tweaking them may be. Options are inconsistent and cluttered, while basic PC functions are missing. There’s no ultra-wide support, there’s no fullscreen functionality (the best you’ll get is borderless window mode) while unlocked frame-rates are also off the table: 120fps is the limit.
Square-Enix’s upscaler support is also barebones – so there’s DLSS only, in tandem with UE4’s TAA and TAAU. Fixed percentage upscale options are in place which are also limited – basically, there is no equivalent option for DLSS balanced or ultra quality modes. That means zero support for FSR and XeSS and no frame generation options either. At this point, it would be remiss of me not to point you towards Nexus Mods because – remarkably – modders have added many of these options where Square-Enix has not. Improved upscaler support, unlocked frame-rates and more – modders have delivered where Square-Enix has not.
Moving on to PlayStation 5 comparisons, we’ve got a mixed bag of results here. There is one crucial improvement to the game that PC users get – one of the key problems with the PS5 and PS5 Pro versions is the egregious pop-in of world detail. The good news is that PC users get the option to enhance level of detail, which pushes out detail and level-of-detail transitions further out to the point where they become far less noticeable. This is great news. We also spotted some slight refinements to lighting, but overall this is much the same as the console build.
Image quality is also a plus point for the PC version of the game, simply down to the brute force nature of DLAA – Nvidia’s native resolution rendition of DLSS – which provides exceptional anti-aliasing. This allows powerful PCs to improve significantly over PS5 Pro’s quality and PSSR-powered versatility modes. There are also signs of some improvement to texture quality – a bugbear we have with the console version. However, the frequency of improved art is minimal and many art assets are left as is – which is not great.
There’s the sense that Square-Enix could have pushed the boat out further. Even if enhanced textures were completely off the table, the ability to improve shadow map cascade quality would have been welcome. The truth is that shadows don’t look particularly impressive in the game, which has led – you guessed it – modders to attempt to improve the situation. The existing version of the game also has some harsh lighting choices and a lack of occlusion and again, it’s disappointing that there’s no improvement for PC. There are oddities too – some detail is excised from the PC version where everything is present and correct on the PS5 version, while we also spotted problems with water rendering in the new version too. Across the board, we can’t help but feel that this port is not everything it should and could have been.
Focusing on PC performance, there are others to address. Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth does have a shader compilation step on first boot – but the problem is that it’s nowhere near comprehensive enough. The lower the spec of your PC (CPU especially), the more noticeable shader compilation issues are with some lurching stutters. We confirmed that it’s definitely a compilation issue by immediately replaying the same area of gameplay, finding that the stutters had gone – because the shaders had been cached. The higher-end your CPU, the less noticeable the stutters will be – especially if you’re capping to 60 frames per second, but even so, it’s a shame to see this problem manifest.
There is some good news, however. Whether it’s Unreal Engine 4 or Unreal Engine 5, we’ve lost count of the amount of games that exhibit traversal stutter – hitching as the player moves through the game world, especially so at speed. On a higher-end processor, the good news is that frame-times are very, very consistent, so in this area at least, you can power through to smoother gameplay – providing you aren’t hitting shader compilation stutter, which is unavoidable. It’s not such good news on lower-end processors however, where we noticed frame-times that could hit 25ms to 33ms – noticeable even with a 60fps frame-rate cap.
It’s also worth expressing that the amount of VRAM your graphics card has can be problematic. We tested using an RTX 4060 – an extremely popular GPU that, unfortunately, Nvidia lumbered with just 8GB of framebuffer memory. Stuttering occurs in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth using the high quality texture setting and even the medium quality alternative has issues. Only by dropping back to the low setting did those stutters disappear and this is problematic: while the difference between high and medium quality textures isn’t vast, there’s a very clear downgrade for low textures – they seem to present almost as if they’re decimated down to quarter resolution. We can’t help but feel this situation could have been handled better.
We also spent a little time running Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth on Steam Deck as it is Steam Deck Verified, which typically means (as we understand it) that we should be able to play it at a consistent 30 frames per second. So, there’s good news and bad news here – again. For the most part, the game can be played at 30fps, but the in-built frame-rate cap is deficient: you’ll get 30fps but the frames are inconsistently paced, which is not great. Users can overcome this by using the Deck’s system level cap for consistent frame-pacing – but even here, we noted issues, with dropped frames spiking to 66ms when they bottom out at 50ms.
This is a challenging game though – it was designed for PS5, after all – and it requires sacrifice to run. We chose to use the lowest settings with TAAU, then used DRS upscaling from a minimum 50 percent. The game is obviously pared back but it is serviceable enough for handheld play for the most part, especially outdoors. Just be prepared for a somewhat choppy experience in cities.
In summary then, this is a better PC port than Final Fantasy 7 Remake and the ability to improve image quality and especially ease the egregious LOD transitions is certainly a good thing. However, Square-Enix must improve in so many areas: the developers clearly recognise the need for shader pre-compilation and yet the process is clearly not working correctly, or doesn’t pre-compile enough of them. The lack of upscalers and the weird implementation of DLSS factors is also bizarre. There can be CPU-based issues with traversal, so we would be recommending something like a Ryzen 5000 or 12th Gen Intel budget chip to better ensure a 60fps experience.
We heard word of further updates to come, so our fingers are crossed that this OK-ish port is improved in the fullness of time.
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