"A bit of ghosting" is an understatement. It's insanely noticeable, and I don't usually see TAA's ghosting.

8:36 "I'm not sure how a one-armed person is supposed to make those leaps" Wait until you see the dog making those same leaps right next to Barret

6:50 just standing there letting Aerith struggle.

12:15 a BIT of ghosting!?! It looks absolutely atrocious!

Ok no joke I'm really impressed that Tifa's chest at 2:36 reacts to her arms realistically!!!

2:37 Yes, big upgrades.

The ghosting on that Segway hurts my eyes

You all saw the disappearing deer @3:53 right?

"Barret's climbing animations seem implausible" while Red XIII is just jumping around in the background lmao.

The lighting choices are truly baffling.

4:30 holy ghosting

"There's a lot of nice incidental details in Rebirth's open world segments" he says, as a deer disappears into the wind before his eyes.

I expect PC release to have all the same flaws but with added shader compilation and traversal stutters.

The amount of pop in in this game is insane, also has graphical bugs even in graphics mode. Crazy how no one is speaking how bad it is.

Really wish 40fps was more standard. Really enjoy it on games that have it.

Very strange how they downgraded the lighting compared to the first remake

When I played FF7 remake, even on PS4, I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about the graphics at all. In this, even though I love the gameplay, I'm constantly aware of the graphical limitations.

There are a lot of areas that go from pitch black to very bright purely based on camera angle. For example when you enter the reactor for the first time, its pitch black then goes very bright depending on camera position/location.

Glad to see they kept in the random PS2 era textures and geometry. Spotting those was my favorite part of Remake.

Both modes look undercooked. I honestly like Remake visuals much more. Especially the lighting. Shinra building chapters were pure CGI tier.

Square forgot that ambient occlusion exist. Nextgen devs really forgot the art of baked lightning, simple but efficient AO, simple cubemap reflections on large body of water, and dynamic shadows. Those super poor shadows and lack of shadow casting lights makes you forget Unreal is even using deffered rendering. Honestly sometimes it feels like going back to oldgen style of rendering and focusing on more poly, and higher final picture quality would lead to better looking games overall.

Idk, I played 1080p games that appear way sharper than this

I've been playing this and can say that the low graphic textures are very apparent. The biggest issue IMO is the lack of a motion blur toggle for the graphics mode, reverse ff16 kind of way, which if present might help hide some of the texture issues. Fortunatly, I am having enough fun to enjoy the whole but it is sad that FF7 Intergrade a 2.5 year old game, has better visual fidelity than its sequel.

4:30 someone call ghost busters

Performance mode is super underwhelming the way it looks rn.

I prefer playing on performance mode, but I found out recently that I’m missing out on some content. In more populated areas like Costa de Sol, certain background npcs will only appear in graphics mode. These npcs can be very unique, having their own animations and dialogue. On the beach you’ll find a couple of muscle heads showing off. Switching between the modes these npcs disappear and reappear like Thanos just snapped his fingers.

Every moment I spend in the game I see some wonderful, inspired content practically in the same frame as the cheapest, nose to the grind crunch work possible. It constantly feels like they had a awesome core team doing visionary work and then a much larger B team to fill in the rest. Also, it feels like they got a group of complete 100% amateurs for their compression team that were also on a blazing fast crunch.

Well this is unfortunate since many reviewers were promising that “the final game looks much better than the demo”

I am astonished to see such awful shadows and low-resolution textures in a game made exclusively for the PS5. How did they look at this and think "This is good enough"?

I feel like these reviews overestimate the max power of ps5. It was never powered adequately for full res 4k and i feel like the expectations are ridiculous. I found this game graphically impressive for the sheer amount of geometry and draw distance on the screen at a single time.

When I played the demo I was baffled at how blurry it looks in performance mode and I saw what looked like upscaling artifacts all over the place. They should have implemented fsr 2.1 or something similar because we have way better upscaling tech.

10:37. You should've tried 1080p as well depending on your TV upscaler

I really find the camera judder in quality mode to be an absolute deal breaker. Think I'll just suck up performance modes blurry visuals

Some of the lighting and texture issues are strange because FF16 (although a different dev house and engine of square) is also on PS5 and it looks absolutely amazing. It’s a huge night and day difference if you look at both games side by side in terms of lighting and texture detail. Both are great either way.

I’ve said it for a long time now. Visually 16 looks so much better and polished. People over at reddit are fanboy coping when they disagree.

I'm glad I wasnt the only one to notice the pretty rough lighting. Definitely the greatest thing that stands out. Not sure what happened ....

At this rate , FF7 part 3 will look like a PS1 era game

Really curious, what you can do in the PC port just through the ini. In Remake you were able to quite drastically increase aspects of the visuals just through the ini. Add upscaled Textures and the visuals of Remake were a lot improved.

This game makes me really wish we had a PS5 pro or a PC release. The 60fps mode verges on unacceptably soft on a 4k monitor up close, and I can definitely notice the lack of motion blur in the 30fps mode. Getting a patch for motion blur on 30fps should be possible, if not a sharper resolve for the 60fps mode.

We really need a dynamic mode with 30-ish fps while exploring and 60fps when entering any battle

they should just call the Performance mode "Pixel-Art Mode"

This game REALLY needs a 40fps mode.

been waiting for this!

Really great tech summary, Oliver! You maybe downplayed how high expectations are for the FF7 graphics to be top bar, especially for a current-gen only release. Missed opportunity in that light!

2:12 her arms, right...

I'm still shocked how polarizing the FF7Remake entries are. Same with Integrade. How in the world is the general art direction so good but the lack of polish so apparent?? Even on PC Integrade isnt really good to this day, yet the basic visuals are really good even on older hardware. There are so many low res assets mixed in with beautiful scenery, I dont understand Square

For those watching but hasn’t played the game: 1. The game looks fine on my 55” Sony 90J. 2. It is a surprisingly beautiful open world game. And perform really well throughout my experience.

It needs like a 45 fps mode that mixes resolution and fps to find a sweet spot.

I do wonder if they will try to patch a bit the lighting. Kinda like how forspoken did

I wonder if this game started development as a PS4 game, or if a PS4 port was intended at some point _à la_ Resident Evil 4.

Fingers crossed they work on some of these issues in the months to come.

Great video Oliver. Thank you and the rest of DF team for what you guys do.

If horizon Forbidden West can look as good as it does and run pretty smoothly I feel the issues can be solved to run at least a little better

Rebirth looks great most of the time but what is up with developers messing up indirect lighting? I was puzzled seeing Persona 3 Remake lacking indirect lighting the PS2 original had. Baked GI should be a thing of past but if it is used, I expect much better results in a PS5 title. Lumen and other real-time techniques seen in the likes of Metro Exodus Enhanced and Avatar look better to me and are still used in the performance modes.

As someone who is struggling to finish 16 due to (amongst other gripes) the huge delta in Graphics and Performance modes, this isn't boding well either. Please can we have a sweet-spot between the two - like a 1440p/60 mode?

Very disappointing seeing as how gorgeous and well developed FF16 looks even on performance mode

What bothers me the most is when the lighting goes off (no shadows) and character models look like something from PS3 era. Just check when Cloud/Sephiroth do their synergy ability in the prologue. It's jarring when Remake character models were always gorgeous no matter what happens on screen. Also nobody's gonna mention the weird pop in in the open environments? (bushes disappearing, etc).

10:45 Is some of the cliff missing? I can see through some of it

Thanks for the great review! I want to know if forcing VRR in quality mode improves the refresh rate. I know VRR isn’t officially implemented in FF7 Rebirth but when forcing it on unsupported titles like Alan Wake 2 it worked really well on my Sony 120HZ 4K OLED. Cheers!

I think the last game looked better 😮

i believe nier automata and nier replicant have something like a 1080p or possibly even less resolution, yet the resolution there still looks better than performance mode here.

Seems to streamline development they just made a continuation of the PS4 version. They made the improvements to PS5 like they did with Intergrade but the baseline is still PS4. Tbh, for FF7, I don't care lol. The character models look great and the overall scenery is beautiful. I could nit pick textures in the environments all day but then I'd be missing one of the best games of the year.

With the PC version of remake I found that I needed at least 90fps after I have turned up the camera sensitivity for it to not look laggy (I leave my frame cap at 120). IDK why the devs always aim for either (30fps)4k or performance. An option for balanced graphics(1440p) while targeting a higher framerate would be a much better experience.

I won't be playing this on a 4k display, should I do performance mode, or is it still too blurry?

It's like they accidently gave us the PS4 Port on the PS5. At this rate PS4 Remastered games look better than Native PS5 games. : (!

Thx for keeping it spoiler free. I'm still on the fence about this title, so will wait for some more information. This helped a bit at least.

What background music do you play at 14:34? Is it from the game itself?

Do we know when and how they will improve performance mode graphics already?

Thank you for not going into any story, character, or set piece specifics. I’ve gone on a total promotional material blackout, sans this video and the demo, and this was exactly as informative to listen to (I didn’t even watch) as I wanted it to be. Thank you for that discretion.

Please put icon/symbols on materia next installment so you can identify any materia at a glance when in the menu. Eg, lightning symbol on lightning materia. This will make for easier, faster materia management and equipping.

This is how I felt about the demo. Including the part about FFXVI looking better. I had forgotten that the remake was usung unreal4. Still gonna pick it up later. I'm hoping Sqenix gives it a bit more love and considers switching engines for the final game.

Think I'll wait and see if Square makes a patch. Performance mode looks too blurry to me atm.

What is performance mode like on a 1080p screen where there is no upscaling to 4k required?

Wait if the resolution of performance mode is 1080+ then why does it look so freaking blurry?

Thank you DF!

I'll forgive chapter 1 low rez rock textures because they have to use gpu power to render Sephiroth and his glorious hair.

So better wait another 2months to play this.

I think this game would look perfect made with Decima engine!

Thank you Olli!

There are difference aside from image resolution between graphics and performance. For example you lose a lot of crowd npcs in performance mode and some objects have lower poly count.

The game doesn’t look like a ps5 game. It almost definitely wasn’t build from the ground up on ps5 like they claimed it was. The texture, resolution and last gen animations for certain things really date it. When you see a game like horizon forbidden west, it really shows off what the ps5 can do. When I see ff 7 rebirth it looks like a game that could have come out 5-10 years ago. I don’t think it looks any better than final fantasy xv which is an 8 year old game. The cinematics, and money shots they used for the trailers are really incredible. The Combat is great. But the out dated open work design like the Ubisoft towers, etc make it feel like a grind. After 30 hours I was really finding the exploration a chore. I like exploring but it was just generic open world stuff again. I really wish they did something different for rebirth but instead just ended up going with an outdated open world design. The resolution really is shit. They tried patching it twice and it’s not better. How a game that’s running on a console that’s apparently almost 10 times more powerful than the ps4, and can’t even run a solid, clear resolution baffles me. In many ways remake looks much better. Yeh, rebirth is open world but when I see a game like forbidden west and I can’t help but feel disappointment. Why we are getting ps4 quality games on the ps5 which has been out for around 4 years is extremely disappointing. You would expect a certain standard to be met but it doesn’t seem like there is a standard when it comes to current gen games.

The Anti-aliasing on the hair and foliage is exceptionally bad and yes the lighting and shadows is very inconsistent and don't even get me started on the obvious pop in and glitches throughout the world.

I got a pg27aqdm 1440p oled monitor and it supports 2160p signal though not a native 4K . Do you recommend that i change the resolution of my PS5 to 1440p for this particular title if I want for the pixelated fuzziness to go away if I want to play on performance mode ?

I have an msi monitor and it has an image strengthening option and it looks amazing.

It's subtle, but a major difference this time around is that Tifa is italian.

One of those rare cases where the game needs a remaster right on launch. But the game is amazing, so I am still having a blast.

What are the best PS5 / TV settings for someone with a 4K VRR like a C3?

Could you guys try the performance mode on a 1080p monitor or tv? A lot of us are still playing on 1080p gaming monitors which I imagine is what the performance mode is targeting.

basically they put their focus on the cutscenes to the determent of the overworld, just like in Remake but more pronounced with the larger world not surprised, or even particularly disappointed, but the performance mode being so blurry is pretty bad, hopefully it'll get patched

I'll have to wait for the PC version to hop in, can't wait.

Will there be another video once the update comes out to fix the weird lighting and performance mode issues?

7:11 the reason for that is that Remake was made of much smaller environments. The shadow resolution is already dynamic, they are using cascading shadows, they are using UE there is no reason they wouldn't. The thing is when you have a much larger environment you will have to compromise on the shadows resolution somewhere, even using cascading shadows, the shadow map is a texture and there is a limit a to the resolution of any texture that you can get in the GPU depending on the GPU model.

With games like Red Dead redemption 2 that released 6 years ago there are zero excuses in 2024.

Man, can't really decide between the two modes. I always go for the higher frame-rate but the hit in res/sharpness is just too noticeable, especially in a game as beautiful and full of detail as this one. On the other hand though, it's really difficult for me to go back to 30fps, just simply panning the camera makes me want to go back to 60fps asap and combat feels super awful in 30fps. I really wish Square would've put more effort into the performance mode optimization, especially when we have so many examples out there with really good-looking performance modes. I have an oled Samsung s90c and perhaps I will play with 30fps and the motion interpolation turned on, the results are way far from ideal but it does smooth things a little bit. Either that or wait for the PC release, but there's no way I'll be able to avoid spoilers until then.

I beat Reunion just minutes before launch and almost preferred it graphically. Performance mode is like looking through foggy glasses.

The softness doesn't really bother me while playing at a distance from my TV, but the lighting issues are very noticeable. Luckily the game is engaging enough that I don't really think about it that much, but when taking the time to sightsee and look around it kind of sticks out sometimes. Hopefully these were performance related decisions, and when the game finally comes for PC the lighting will be enhanced.

I just started the game. I played Intermission a few days ago and the difference in graphical quality is jarring so I immediately came here to make sure I wasn't crazy. I'm still in Nibelheim but so far Graphics mode is much sharper but feels like 20fps. Performance is significantly smoother but is so blurry that I can tell sitting 10ft from the TV and my god when I actually walked up to it to see how blurry it was, I was kind of astonished at how bad it was. Graphics mode feels unplayable to me so I guess I just have to deal with Performance. I hope they do something to fix this soon.

I gave up and set my PS5 to 1080p and put on graphics mode. Works great now. But its insane next gen is 1080p at 30fps lmao

Excellent work as always gentlemen.

Is anybody else getting signal drops when scenes change? It's like it's having to drop the input signal in order to render the beginning of a cutscene from gameplay. Any thoughts?