Final Fantasy 7 Remake On PC Has A Major Stuttering Issue But This Setting Could Help

It was such a media sensation that it's hard to overstate its impact, so it shouldn't be surprising that the Final Fantasy VII Remake was a huge seller when it landed in April of last year. It was a PlayStation 4 exclusive at that time, though it saw an upgraded re-release on the PlayStation 5 earlier this year. Surprisingly, just 6 months later, that version (subtitled "Intergrade") has now landed on the PC's Epic Games Store, but before you run off to throw money at Epic, let's talk about the quality of the port.

That means that your game will be visibly stuttering despite your FPS counter still reading "60" or higher—even if using PresentMon or other utilities that rely on the same metrics, like RTSS or OCAT. The problem is so bad that, even playing at a 1920×1080 resolution, Battaglia says his "RTX 3090 and 10900K" are struggling to produce playable performance at times.

Checking in with the user-edited PC Gaming Wiki, it seems like some folks have gotten relief from a combination of mods for the game. Indeed, given that this is a PC game, we don't have to wait for a patch; we can try to fix up the game ourselves. The most popular change seems to be to force the game to run in DirectX 11 mode rather than its default DirectX 12 renderer. You can do this by simply adding "-dx11" as a launch option. Do note that doing this will break HDR support completely, and may have other unintended effects on the game's presentation.

Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade is $70, and regional pricing has it even higher in some places. That cost stings on its own, but it's even worse when the 100GB-plus game is lacking simple features that we expect from PC games. We expect toggles for depth of field, motion blur, and dynamic resolution; all of these controls are absent from the game, and enabled by default. FF7R is based on Unreal Engine 4, and there are the usual tweaks for all of this, but sadly the game doesn't expose its configuration files the way most Unreal Engine games do.

We're currently not planning to do our own FF7R performance testing, and given the problems with the game it's unlikely we'll be using it for benchmarking unless there's a big patch. Digital Foundry will likely be doing a video that puts the game through its paces, though. It might be an amusing watch, but Battaglia has already spoiled the ending for us.

Speaking on gaming forum ResetEra, he said "This is literally the worst AAA release I have seen on PC in a good long time. I humbly submit that no one should buy it." For folks who already did, hopefully the mods can get you moving. The rest of us will hope for a patch (or at least a lower-cost Steam release.)