Final Fantasy IX Performance - Frame Buffer Effects
Publish date: 2024-06-16
Final Fantasy IX Performance - Frame Buffer Effects
Benchmark battle scene
Either fortunately or unfortunately (depending on your preferences), this is where most of the playing time in Final Fantasy games is spent. Welcome to the battle system. Here, we see offscreen drawing, framebuffer uploads and framebuffer effects in full swing. This portion of the game is also rendered at full framerate.
Here, we see the first really large difference of the day. The ATI cards jump to the top of the heap with a very significant lead in performance. The GeForce FX 5700 Ultra barely squeaks by the full speed 60 fps limit. Of course, one of my favorite parts about playing this game on an emulator is that I can run at insane framerates and just push the X button a bunch to get through battle scenes faster. That trick actually works really well with all the effects and bells and whistles turned off, but that's neither here nor there.
What's here is the fact that the ATI Radeon based cards just handle the brute force of the battle scenes (which are some of the most complex to emulate in the PSX world) with much more ease than even the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra.
CPU speed doesn't quite affect battle system performance as much as the GPU. It is good to see that Intel processors aren't still bottlenecked for this benchmark. The Prescott, Northwood and Newcastle processors all deliver about the same performance here, while the P4 EE and Athlon 64 3400+ lead the way.
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