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For a while there, Final Fantasy 15 performance was looking a touch dodgy. Seemingly prioritising visual accomplishments over a stable frame-rate, each of the title's early previews exhibited profound issues - and even the more recent Platinum demo, which introduced dynamic resolution scaling, still disappointed. The good news is that the release code's finishing touches include the required raft of optimisations required to sustain 30fps. The bad news is that a key issue remains unresolved on PlayStation 4 hardware - one that Square-Enix really needs to address.We're referring to incorrect frame-pacing. At the risk of turning this into a lecture, there's a reason why visually complex games lock to 30fps instead of matching your typical display's standard 60Hz - developers have twice the amount of render time available, and by presenting a new frame on every other refresh, you still get a smooth, consistent experience. Bad console frame-pacing typically sees developers put the required 30fps cap in place, but do not update the new frame on every other display update.
The end result is that you get a jittery presentation that actually looks like a lower frame-rate presentation. Frames should arrive paced at clean 33ms intervals, but instead they persist for 16ms, 33ms or even 50ms. In a third person title like Final Fantasy 15, which has a lot of sweeping camera movement, the perceived judder is difficult to ignore. However, here's the thing - Xbox One is completely unaffected, and there is a mode unique to the PS4 Pro version that also seems to mostly address the problem.
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