Final Fantasy XV - Runs fine on Windows

Ars Technica: Final Fantasy XV runs fine on a Windows PC:

Final Fantasy XV for Windows should have been a mess, but it’s the opposite

Square Enix mostly delivers the scalable, tweakable performance that PC gamers crave.

The open-world RPG Final Fantasy XV has finally launched for Windows PCs ($49.99 at Steam, Windows Store), roughly 15 months after its console predecessor. Up until this week, we weren't so sure this later version would be worth playing.

Nearly six months ago to the day, Square Enix invited us to take a world's-first look at FFXV's PC version. It wasn't good news. The clearly incomplete preview build included everything in our worst PC-port nightmares: messy mouse-and-keyboard support, incorrect resolution scaling, lousy tweaking options, and a frame rate only a mother could love.

This was followed with a February launch of an FFXV benchmarking tool, full of in-game sequences meant to tax your system and print out a vague score. However, this tool turned out so rough that Square Enix now tells fans to ignore its readings. Between that and the lack of advance access to review the PC version, we wouldn't have been surprised to see this port launch as an utter disaster.

But—what's this?—Square Enix has apparently pulled it off. Final Fantasy XV, at least based on anecdotal testing and tinkering, has landed on Windows with a breadth of tweakable options, a suite of noticeable boosts, and a knack for scaled performance. I've certainly noticed quirks in a day of testing, but the Japanese developer deserves credit for making good on a PC port worth checking out.

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More information.

It's a sad state of affairs when someone releases a game for Windows and the fact that it actually works is headline-worthy.

I basically agree it is a bad state of affairs but I think in this case sq has taken a lot of shit for not producing a decent pc port so they deserve a little credit when they finally make the investment.

My desktop begs to differ on this. Sample size of one. Have 16 GB of RAM, GTX 1080 Ti only trying to do 1600x900. I was once able to get through the tutorial without a crash. Crashes when trying to start the opening sequence but dont know why. Plenty of ram (though Windows can still be weird at 32-bit boundaries aka 4 GB, 8GB, 12 GB, 16GB ... and I think I'm near 8GB). Upgraded Nvidia drivers and can at least get to the 3rd car passing before crashing. Does this game really need 75GB of disk? At least it looks nice when it does run.

Also greenmangaming.com had this for 20% off.

More than 8Gb of RAM is irrelevant for this game unless you're playing it on 4K. Apparently some memory leak does exist, but I cannot confirm it.
As your GPU has plenty of VRAM, you shuld set TRAM option in the game at highest so the game uses all VRAM available, regardless of resolution.

I've seen people reporting frequent crashes, but kill me if I know what causes them. Honestly, I suspect i7 as all those reports mention that CPU - I'm playing the game on i5 and don't have frequent crashes in fact I had two in 20 hours of playtime so far and both occured when I used "return back to car" fasttravel option.

As I posted in another thread, there is performance bug that happens on any setup - when you use summon your FPS will drop so low the game will become a slideshow as if it was a console and not PC.
So far there is no confirmed workaround and restarting the game will "fix" it. My best guess is that it's yet another case of so called 24 FPS bug connected to borderless window thing which was supposed to be addressed previously through drivers. Can't know more as I still don't have summons (you get them in chapter 5) and I don't play any of known 24 FPS "bugged" games.

You asked if the game needs 75GB of disk, I'd say yes - seems that audio is in lossless FLAC format and in carradio you get plenty of OSTs including ones from older FFs.
Add to that several language voiceovers where you can't choose upon installing which one to use so it doesn't download the rest. Which was a good thing in my case, I got so irritated with English dub I had to switch to japanese voiceover.

Just to follow up. Thanks for the info. I do have an i7 4770k or something like that. The setting I suspect that caused me problems was that I had page files turned off (cause I got 16 GB of ram) but noticed that the process will reserve 16 GB or more of Commit Size while working set is 4-6 GB. So I think the commit reservation might have been the issue. Also moved the game from 7200RPM to SSD (which helped loading times) but didn't fix immediate crash. Needs time to bake to see if its real.

Edit: Nope that wasn't it but I did get through the intro sequence. Guess I have to back burner this for a while.

Bummer. Ther demo ran very nicely for the 30 minutes I played it. I was expecting worse playing at 4k resolution, but it was smooth. No crashes.

My rig = i7 (not sure which kind), 32GB of RAM, GTX 1080 (8GB VRAM), 64-bit Win 10.

joxer said:

As I posted in another thread, there is performance bug that happens on any setup - when you use summon your FPS will drop so low the game will become a slideshow as if it was a console and not PC.

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A tiny hotfix just went live:
http://steamcommunity.com/games/637650/announcements/detail/1665641971169211624

Patch – 12/03/18
12 March - daniels
Patch note:
We have fixed the bug that involved the Frame Rate Per Second decreasing after summoning an astral.

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Also for those people that have frequent crashes, a strange suggestion was posted by a player who says this "method" fixed it on his side:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/637650/discussions/0/1697167355222491280/

go to your FFXV Install folder, and delete Tobii.GameIntegration.dll, now try running the game, nope it doesnt work great!, now go to steam Right click FFXV, Properties, Local Files, Validate all Files. LET IT DO ITS THING ITS GOING TO TAKE A WHILE, if it says your missing files then let em download and youre FIXED PLAY YOUR HEART OUT! please like or bump or whatever if this helped you!

Note: it has nothing to do with Tobii this method is forcing steam to redownload files because we know one is missing, which strangely causes more files to download if for some reason your game keeps crashing.

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Odd.
Another "fix" suggested for crashes:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/637650/discussions/1/1697167355220981468/

If you have Virtual Memory specified yourself (like I had) at a max. of 8000MB or lower then the game will CTD. I haven't tried the lowest possible setting, but it's somewhere around 25GB of Total Memory - that is System RAM + Virtual RAM. So even if you have 16GB RAM, if you specified Virtual Memory yourself and didn't make it large enough, you get CTD.

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Point of the story, never mess with virtual memory.