Final Fantasy 7 Remake - Digital Foundry Tech Review - Beautiful, But Not Flawless

Join Alex Battaglia and John Linneman for a detailed breakdown of the Final Fantasy 7 Remake. We check out PS4 Pro and PS4 visual comparisons and performance and appreciate the often stunning use of Unreal Engine 4. It's a beautiful game but it's not flawless. What's up with the texture popping and can an SSD brute force your way through the issues?

[picolete]

They are so poor in the slum that they don`t even have money for textures

[siddhantbanerjee]

No joke, the door lead me to this video. Yes, THAT door.

[blizzardxxl]

The Texture loading issue has been an issue with the Unreal Engine for a long long time. I remember last gen, most Unreal 3 games just had horrendous texture pop in/loading delay. The fact that Jedi and FF7 also have this, still tell's me it's the way the engine handles texture streaming and it's being designed to be streamed with a 5400rpm drive.

Will be very interesting to see how this is effected on the PS5

[DigitalFoundry]

We wanted to get this content to you as quickly as possible - and YouTube's encoders are still processing higher quality 1080p and of course 4K video encodes. Watch now for our critique of FF7R and/or check back later for improved image quality.

[JerryFlowersIII]

I really am happy about how they use motion blur here, exactly how I prefer it.

[BonJovy]

Unreal Engine and textures problem. well who would have thought...

[CallumHurley]

I'm so glad it's not just me. This game goes from looking breath-taking to looking 8 years old and back quite often.

[zeiters]

HD towns have always been the greatest adversary of Square ENix.

[mightylink]

It's so weird how Advent Children is starting to look a little bit dated compared to this game, imagine what the difference will be when the final part comes out on the PS5.

[turdhat]

The texture are just paying homage to the Nintendo 64.

[joelmiller]

So glad you guys confirmed what I thought. I remember being blown away by the demo. Everything was so premium and polished. But after that point there was a very noticeable drop in quality. I almost feel as though inconsistent is worse than consistently average because it makes the drop in quality so jarringly noticeable.

Love your work, DF!

[MarchofDays]

I've noticed the low quality textures (that door sticks out so so much, reminded me of GTA: San Andreas), but I didn't have nowhere near as severe texture streaming issues. For the record, I'm playing on a base PS4 from 2015.

I'm surprised you didn't mention the NPC pop-in, it's really noticeable in some sections, mostly because they don't use dithering to render them in, they just appear.

[Digniax]

13:08 Good to see more games adapting the Pokemon Sword & Shield character pop in.

[liamj]

The frame at 12:46 looks like someone modded Cloud into Fallout 3!

[poruchansamakundono]

what about aerith's low res flowers by her house?!

[daking]

Those low res textures remind me of Fallout 76. SIXTEEN TIMES THE DETAIL

[tolkienmaster]

I experienced the same texture issues during my work with the review. Good to see I'm not the only one.

Btw, I noticed that some of the background were extremely flat and low polished when you can see the slums from high above, such as chapter 6 (or 7, can't remember for sure) and 15 (almost remind me of the good old pre-rendered backgrounds from the originals). Would love to hear if anyone else experienced the same issue.

[SoftNoize]

I have watched nearly a dozen of FF7R reviews and no one even mentions it. I find bad textures, the polygons and loading delays so blatant that it makes me almost want to stop and wait (and pray) for a patch. The more I try not to think about it, the more I notice it while playing.

[RobOngrui]

Square be like: Let's take YEARS to develop the Luminous engine and then never use it

[sdewey]

Good ol' Unreal Engine, gorgeous but has a history of poor data streaming.

Hopefully they'll address some of those texture pop ins but to be honest if that's the worst it's got then bring it on I'm looking forward to you!