If you’ve been following Final Fantasy XIV’s Lodestone for a while now, then you likely know that Square Enix has released a benchmarking tool for Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward.
Of course, if you’re a new player or just getting into FFXIV now, then this is your ideal starting point for fiddling around with your settings for the DirectX 11 client and handling your Au Ra character change come the expansion.
Let’s take a quick look at what you’ll be expecting from the benchmark, as well as some tips brought up online for people to get more out of the game’s looks and frames-per-second output.
Test your systems, tweak your looks
The Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward Benchmark tool is a 1.6 GB download that allows players and prospective buyers to test their systems and create and save character data ahead of the launch of Heavensward.
The benchmark tool’s actual benchmark lets you alter a number of graphical settings and then allows you to run a video test that will give you a numerical score and general title (AVERAGE, HIGH, VERY HIGH, etc.) for your computer’s supposed capability to handle either the DX9 or DX11 client.
I say supposed here because the game may actually be slightly better or worse depending on other external conditions at launch, so your end figure here is more of an estimate of how well you can run FFXIV: Heavensward.
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The other bit that comes with the Heavensward benchmark tool is the character creation tool, which will let you create a new character from scratch and deck it out in various test gear. Of course, one of the big draws of this character creator is the ability to make Au Ra characters, a new race that will make its appearance in Heavensward as a playable character type.
With regard to the benchmark itself again, there are some ways to improve your score and potentially get better output when FFXIV: Heavensward comes out.
Chordscollide on Reddit has a nice guide up for general use, explaining which settings can be turned on or off safely for a quality bump. Meanwhile, NVIDIA’s Andrew Barnes has a post on their site explaining what NVIDIA’s graphics cards and card-specific tweaks can be used on the system for better results.
To end today’s feature, I’ll leave you with another video of Final Fantasy XIV. In this case, a fictional fighting game starring FFXIV’s characters. Cheers!
