Final Fantasy 15's PC version supports Nvidia Ansel, so here's some crazy 8K resolution screenshots
Nvidia's screenshot tool being in Final Fantasy 15 on PC can only mean one thing: 8K screenshots! They look amazing, as you'd expect.
Back when Final Fantasy 15: Windows Edition was announced, Square Enix made the decision to do so at an Nvidia event, a sign that the Japanese RPG house and the dominating GPU manufacturer were working closely together on the port. One of the announcements was that the game would support Nvidia's Ansel screenshot-taking tech - a really cool tool we showcased before with Pro Evo 2018 and Mass Effect Andromeda.
It didn't really dawn on me quite how cool this'd be for FF15 until I booted up the FF15 PC Benchmark, however. FF15's characters are quite detailed and have some lovely, beautifully smooth animations that seem to beg to be frame-by-framed.
Ansel's got some great super resolution technology, too, so for instance I was able to take screenshots like this at a whopping 7680x4320 resolution - that's 8K. Suck it, 4K. These screenshots have large file sizes for obvious reasons. Not safe for 56k, etcetera etcetera...
Click it and marvel. If you do the right click, view image as source and view at native size thing, well... when you do that, you are seriously looking at that screenshot. Here's two more using that tech, just because it's super cool:
You can't use the Final Fantasy 15 Windows Edition benchmark in this resolution - 4K is the max - but it still looks pretty damn sharp even at that resolution, and the Ansel screenshot tool is sure to give Final Fantasy fans hours of enjoyment playing around snapping photos of the world. Cut and hidden content hunters be forewarned, too - Ansel lets you clip the camera through solid objects including walls and the floor, at least in the benchmark.
In case you're wondering, I was running the benchmark on an Nvidia 1080Ti graphics card. The benchmark was running at 4K and on the highest quality settings available - the frame rate tended to hover around the 35-40 frames per second mark - so not the magic 60, though that'll clearly be very achievable at sub-4K levels.
Ansel works by freezing a moment on your command before re-rendering it piecemeal at a higher resolution (it goes way higher than 8K, but those file sizes are too crushing for our site) - which means games have to be built to support it. Thankfully, FF15 PC does. We'll do a full report on the PC version of the game and its performance once we get to test the final thing.
In the meantime, here's some more lovely 4K shots of FF15 courtesy of Nvidia Ansel and the Benchmark tool. You can try this for yourself if you own an Nvidia GPU - just download the benchmark tool. It's looking pretty sharp, don't you think?
