Gaming Tests: Final Fantasy XIV
Despite being one number less than Final Fantasy 15, because FF14 is a massively-multiplayer online title, there are always yearly update packages which give the opportunity for graphical updates too. In 2019, FFXIV launched its Shadowbringers expansion, and an official standalone benchmark was released at the same time for users to understand what level of performance they could expect. Much like the FF15 benchmark we’ve been using for a while, this test is a long 7-minute scene of simulated gameplay within the title. There are a number of interesting graphical features, and it certainly looks more like a 2019 title than a 2010 release, which is when FF14 first came out.
With this being a standalone benchmark, we do not have to worry about updates, and the idea for these sort of tests for end-users is to keep the code base consistent. For our testing suite, we are using the following settings:
- 768p Minimum,
- 1440p Minimum,
- 4K Minimum,
- 1080p Maximum
On the automation side of things, despite this benchmark being newer than the FF15 test, it doesn’t have as many features. There are no command line options, and key presses do not work, which means the benchmark has to be aligned with mouse movement and clicks for it to be initiated. Also, the benchmark does not automatically output a results file – there is a button on the benchmark interface to ‘save score’, which also has to be navigated to. With automation, we’re able to detect when the main benchmark window finishes in order to direct where our mouse movements go. The output unfortunately only gives us the average frame rate, and not percentiles.
Thankfully the settings file is a simple .ini file, and we can just copy over pre-built ones for each setting before we load up the benchmark. As with the other benchmarks, we do as many runs until 10 minutes per resolution/setting combination has passed, and then take averages. Realistically, because of the length of this test, this equates to two runs per setting.
| AnandTech | IGP | Low | Medium | High |
| Average FPS | |  |  |  |
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7orrAp5utnZOde6S7zGiqoaenZH5ygJFuZqWZpaOwqbXNoGStoJVisLHBjKitnqqcpK6lec%2BrpqOdk6l6tbHSraCnn12aw6a%2B2GavcW5dmbK0t9Oop2aooqSwpr%2FSqKlmq5mjsKZ5kWloaWdhbQ%3D%3D