As you may already be aware of, the PC benchmark of Final Fantasy XV featured three specific NVIDIA GameWorks effects. These three effects were: Turf, HairWorks and Flow. The final version of the game will support two additional effects, VXAO and ShadowWorks, and Resetera’s member icecold1983 was able to enable VXAO in the benchmark tool, showcasing what gamers can expect from this technique.
According to NVIDIA, VXAO is a new ambient occlusion technique that is 3-4x slower than HBAO+, while its results are much better than HBAO+. And as we can see in the following comparison screenshots, there are some slight visual improvements.
Ambient Occlusion is stronger and better thanks to VXAO, something that adds an extra layer of depth to the overall image. As such, the environments can feel more natural thanks to it, however, it comes with a huge performance hit. In some cases we are looking at a 40fps hit, so yeah… this setting is only for those that own the best high-end GPUs.
It’s also worth noting that in some scenes, there are minimal differences. This can be easily noticed in the last two comparison screenshots. Nevertheless, it’s cool that Square Enix will be offering PC gamers the option to enable it.
Final Fantasy XV Windows Edition will release on March 6th. Enjoy the comparison screenshots below (no-VXAO is on the left whereas VXAO is on the right. We strongly suggest opening the images in new tabs in order to see the differences between them).
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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