While many were very excited when Final Fantasy 7 Remake finally arrived on PC after a year and a half from its original release date, it was quickly discovered that this port has some major problems that will hopefully be addressed in a future patch.
As reported by PC Gamer, Final Fantasy 7 Remake’s Graphics Settings list on PC is surprisingly bare and offers “no variable framerate option, no way to tweak anti-aliasing, toggle VSync, or control effects like motion blur.” There is also no way to control resolution scaling to help balance image quality and performance.
Speaking of performance, there have also been reports of framerate drops and instability when simply moving the camera.
I never really do this, since I usually cover this in a video, but @oliemack is going to be on this when I am on holiday. But this is just one brief moment in the first 5 minutes of the game. Spinning the camera causes a sustained drop and then a big stutter. RTSS does not see it https://t.co/pvTAML3dEX pic.twitter.com/UgDWzO9Iav
— Alexander Battaglia (@Dachsjaeger) December 17, 2021
Digital Foundry’s John Linneman and Alexander Battaglia noticed these issues, even when capturing using “an RTX3090 and 10900k at just 1080p.” Linneman called it “a mess,” saying “the smooth presentation was central to [FF7 Remake’s] story telling and this version compromises it.”
This was a bit of a surprise as other Square Enix PC ports, including Final Fantasy XV and Kingdom Hearts 3, all had far more options than Final Fantasy 7 Remake currently has.
There has been no word as of yet from Square Enix regarding these issues, but PCGamingWiki notes that “The game can drop fps from 120 to below 30 fps when texture settings are set to high on a GPU with 8GB of VRAM or less.” While this very well may be a problem, it does not account for why Battaglia’s 3090 – which has 24GB of VRAM – is still stuttering.
Fans are even more upset as Final Fantasy 7 Remake on PC is one of the first PC games to cost $70, a practice now seen in this new PS5 and Xbox Series X/S generation.
Hopefully, these issues are resolved, because Final Fantasy 7 Remake was considered by many, including IGN, to be a success in bringing FF7 to the modern era. In our review on PS4, we said that its “dull filler and convoluted additions can cause it to stumble, but it still breathes exciting new life into a classic while standing as a great RPG all its own.”
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Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.
