Final Fantasy XIV Benchmark and New Videos

With the beta kicking off, Square Enix released new content yesterday with regards to A Realm Reborn in the form of two new in-game videos and the application benchmark tool.

The videos are both in-game (for the beta, of course). One details a "tour" of several of the game's areas on both Windows and PlayStation 3, in which the environments all look lovely and the battles and events dynamic. Not sure if it's the video or the engine, but the PS3 scenes look to be a bit less fluid and more jittery. I'd assume that the PS3 version hasn't been quite as optimized as Windows as yet.

The second video is a developer's commentary (in Japanese, with some subtitles) in which the use of a gamepad to play is described. Since PS3 and PC users will all coexist in-game, it's important that the use of a gamepad to play the game is as functional and easy as with keyboard and mouse. To that end, it appears that the PS3 (and who knows, maybe 4?) gamepad will have at least three full sets of functionality available to the d-pad and face buttons, toggled on and off by tapping the left and right triggers. The default sets will also be customizable.

In case you've never done a benchmark before, Final Fantasy XIV's is specifically meant to see how your PC would do trying to run the game. Essentially, it tests your system to see its performance and to suggest to you if you need an upgrade of any kind before trying and/or buying the game. It's a 470MB file, so it's not necessarily something you do on a whim.

Of course, I did it on a whim. What they show in the benchmark looks absolutely fantastic. The second scene, which starts with a group of chocobo riders running through windmills, was particularly good looking. And my new PC scored "fairly high" at 1920x1200 with maximum settings and even higher when I dropped one level to high settings , so I would think that a gaming PC build in the last couple years with a less-than-HD video output would do just fine. Heck, it even kind of makes me wish I had the time to try to get into the beta.

Source: IGN