- As always, if you are worried about spoilers, do not watch. They say they use footage from 'the first 40%' of the game.
Features:
- Character models have subtle improvements, they have been remade and show more finer details compared to FFVIIR even if you won't notice them as a quick glance
- Hair dithering on Cloud/Aerith etc have been reduced compared to VIIR
- Cut-scene lighting improved with more effective in-direct lighting
- Fidelity and animation looks better than Advent Children, in the cut-scenes
- Polygonal density in open world environments is 'pretty solid'. PS5's primitive shaders used to add incidental detail in environments per developers
- Aside the broader scope, some areas are very similar to the previous game and 'Quite a few spots where we've actually taken a step back'
Visuals:
- Environmental lighting is one of the most obvious visual flaws
- Multiple areas are presented without any shadow casting lights
- FFVII Remake's baked lighting did a better job simulating baked GI with 'worse lighting in typical play' in Rebirth, by comparison.
- Shadows have a lot of breakup in game play, cascades also have a 'comically close distance'
- FFVII Remake by comparison had higher resolution shadows, further boosted in Intergrade
- Fair number of low resolution textures also seen. Mt. Nibelheim area is where this is most notable
- Traversal animation is also stilted, jerky when traversing the world.
- SSR doesn't have cube-map fallbacks so their cut-off point is easily seen when moving the camera
- Zero physics on any foliage (original reveal trailer had foliage bending on character models but final game does not)
- 'Generally a good looking game ... but has obvious visual flaws ... that can make it look less visually appealing than its predecessor'
Performance:
- Visual settings are a match in both Graphics and Performance mode
- Both modes use DRS
- Performance: Average at 1152p
- Graphics: Average at or near 4K
- Performance mode uses nearest neighbor up-scaling, softer than usual and pretty blocky.
- Setting system to 1440p seems to reduce the blockiness
- Performance mode is ' a lot less sharper than FFVII Remake when targeting 60 FPS'
- Graphics mode looks clean and sharp with minor ghosting but otherwise a good resolve.
- Only per-object motion blur, no camera-based motion blur.
- Graphics mode is a consistent 30 FPS with one-off drop here and there disrupting it
- Performance mode is wobblier, sticks to 60 earlier areas but combat can drop to 50s, especially in high particle areas. Neibleheim area also drops performance in traversal.
- Load times are very fast across the board.
- DF recommends the Graphics mode at the moment.
- Verdict: 'Curiously uneven experience'. DF compares it to FF16 at the end and say it was quite a whole more visually impressive compared to FFVII Rebirth.