This collaboration has seen Square Enix’s next-gen Luminous Engine loaded with the most advanced visual effects available, resulting in the creation of the most beautiful open-world game ever made. Each visual effect affects different aspects of the game, enhancing virtually every scene from start to finish of the massive game.
Shadows are one of the most important elements of any game for creating realistic and believable worlds. In FINAL FANTASY XV WINDOWS EDITION, Square Enix have cranked up the fidelity and resolution of the game’s shadows, and are also enhancing the player’s avatar with our Hybrid Frustum Traced Shadow technology. This enables the player’s character to cast highly detailed, extremely precise shadows onto himself, further improving image quality.
In addition to shadow techniques such as NVIDIA HFTS, games employ Ambient Occlusion techniques to render contact shadows where two surfaces or objects meet, and where an object blocks light from reaching another nearby game element. This helps ground characters, adds depth perception to objects and fine detail, and often adds shadow detail to characters’ clothes and hair, and grass. Without these shadows, scenes appear flat and unrealistic, and objects appear to float. By introducing NVIDIA Voxel Ambient Occlusion, FINAL FANTASY XV WINDOWS EDITION receives the highest-quality Ambient Occlusion shadowing available on any platform.
With VXAO, occlusion and lighting information is gathered from a ‘world space’ voxel representation of a scene, which takes into account a large area around the viewer. Included in this voxelization are objects and details currently invisible to the viewer, and those behind the viewer, too. The result is scene-wide Ambient Occlusion shadowing, instead of ‘screen space’ shadowing used by other techniques that merely render AO shadows based on what you the player can currently see. This allows VXAO shadows to be cast into a scene from objects near to the player but just outside of their view, and from occluded objects in the distance large enough to affect the appearance of the scene. Furthermore, VXAO’s precision and accuracy enables significantly improved Ambient Occlusion shadowing in detailed environments, as is particularly evident here.
In FINAL FANTASY XV’s vast open world, massive portions of land are covered by grass and other foliage. To enhance these areas NVIDIA Turf Effects have been integrated, turning tufts of boot-high grass into fields of knee-high, dynamic grass that sways in the wind and is accurately shadowed by VXAO. Furthermore, as players, enemies, animals and other NPCs move through the grass, individual pieces of the tessellated greenery will bend and flatten, leaving visible trails that players can follow when in pursuit of a fleeing foe. This further increases immersion and visual fidelity, creating dynamic areas that react realistically to your actions.
Out in the grass-filled plains and fields of FINAL FANTASY XV, players often encounter giant beasts. With the aid of NVIDIA HairWorks, Square Enix has been able to give these beasts the appearance they originally envisioned back when drawing their initial designs. Now, these beasts are covered in thick, flowing hair that dynamically reacts to movement, wind, and enemy attacks, creating more detailed, more realistic scenes that immerse you in the world and its events.
Another technology employed to enhance immersion is NVIDIA Flow, a highly realistic real-time fluid, fire and smoke simulator. With this cutting-edge feature fire effects will look better than you ever seen them before; fire, smoke and embers will wrap and warp around other objects; and emitted effects can be further affected by wind and other forces.
Together with the other NVIDIA GameWorks effects detailed above, NVIDIA Flow increases image quality and immersion, and cements FINAL FANTASY XV WINDOWS EDITION’s position as one of the best-looking open world game ever made.
In addition to all that GameWorks-powered graphical goodness, Square Enix is cranking up texture quality levels to 4K, supporting 8K gameplay resolutions out of the box, integrating HDR10 for superior brightness, color and contrast on compatible TVs and G-SYNC HDR monitors, implementing Dolby Atmos for superior audio, and adding a first-person gameplay option. Post-launch console DLC (EPISODES GLADIOLUS, PROMPTO and IGNIS, as well as the FINAL FANTASY XV MULTIPLAYER EXPANSION: COMRADES) is included, as are all free game updates, and with higher detail levels for other settings gamers can increase view distances and crank up overall graphical fidelity, giving you a game that will look amazing for years to come with each new generation of ever more powerful graphics cards.
Sweet and good to see FF XV coming to the PC and colour me impressed that NVidia has partnered alongside Square/Enix and putting in loads of GameWorks features. Also supports 8K and ANSEL. Roll on 2018 I say
