If you’re wondering if Dawntrail and Final Fantasy 14’s massive graphics update will work for your computer, you won’t have to wait much longer. The official Dawntrail benchmark will be available for download free tomorrow, April 14th, at midnight PDT, as announced during a Live Letter from the Producer last night.
The benchmark is, in short, a test of a PC’s capabilities in running the game. For Endwalker, the benchmark displayed average FPS and gave players a “rating” about how well the game would play. It especially tests common scenarios and graphics such as battle effects, large character volumes, and long-distance map rendering.
Dawntrail’s benchmark program will be especially important, as Dawntrail introduces a new series of minimum computer requirements for those playing on PC. The majority of these requirements are due to the new expansive graphic design updates, as they’ll put more strain on PCs, though it was mentioned during PAX East that Intel will be discontinuing support for certain CPUs, forcing further compatibility requirements.
The new PC requirements are presently as follows:
- 140 GB storage
- Intel Core 17-770
- NVIDIA® Geforce® GTX970 (4GB) or higher;or AMD Radeon™ RX 480 or higher
- DirectX 11
As shown during the Live Letter, the graphics improvements are nothing to sneeze at. In the past, we saw some basic textural updates, but last night’s presentation went more in-depth as to more technical improvements that’ll make the game look gorgeous.
We got a better look at grass rendering, which allows grass to “sway” as players move through them, improving from one of the game’s weakest visual points, plus some improvements to water and wetness, weather and environmental reactions to it, finger/toe poly count, and general lighting. The Aetherytes also look absolutely stunning.
The stream introduced more settings that’ll be included with Dawntrail, including TSCMAA to improve long-distance rendering, “soft shadow” rendering, 3D rendering and dynamic resolution with NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR, and Super Resolution graphics upscaling.
On consoles, setting availability will be as usual, though on high-quality consoles like the Playstation 5 and Xbox, certain “high-quality” settings will be forced on by default.
If your PC isn’t up to par, thankfully, you’ll have plenty of time to upgrade before the expansion drops, officially July 2nd and early access from June 30th on.
Will you be trying out the new graphics on PC? Or maybe on a console? I know I’ll be learning how to use the PS5 controller to play it in 4K.
