This game is extremely VRAM hungry, and most areas will struggle to hit playable framerates on older/low-end cards with "only" 8GB.

You can check if you're VRAM limited by comparing performance with the legacy upscaler and FSR3. If FSR3 (without framegen) reduces your FPS compared to the legacy option, this guide is for you.

Please note that the game will slow down when running under 30FPS (before framegen) in combat. If you're getting 30FPS with framegen, your game will still be running at about half speed.

To fix this, we'll have to make significant compromises to image quality. Even still, the result will look a bit better than the most extreme upscaling options.

Reducing upscaling quality reduces the game's internal resolution, but for some reason it does not reduce VRAM usage.

Instead, you'll have to reduce the game's output resolution. In display settings, set the window mode to Fullscreen. Then, set the resolution to 1760x990. (This seems to be the highest option that consistently performs well on 8GB cards)

If you're using the Special-K mod, you may need to remove it in order to lower fullscreen resolution.

This game doesn't seem to properly free VRAM, so restart the game to get the full performance gain.

You should now see much better performance without changing and other settings, but the game will appear blurry and terrible.

Now that VRAM is less tight, we can turn FSR3 on without much of a performance hit. Enable frame generation as well.

Turn on dynamic resolution, and set your framerate target to something achievable. I'd recommend 48-60FPS for VRR (Freesync/Gsync) displays, and 30FPS otherwise.

You should also enable Screen Space Reflections and Ambient Occlusion if they're off. These graphics settings have little impact on performance, but make the game look much nicer.

You'll now get a much smoother output, with better upscaling to 990p...

...but the 990p image still won't look good on your 1080p or 1440p screen.

This can be improved by using FSR1 to scale the game to your screen's resolution.

First, turn OFF the in-game sharpening by setting sharpness to 0 in the graphics settings. (The in-game sharpening will run at 990p, but we want to apply sharpening at our display resolution, after the extra FSR1 step.

Press Alt+R to open radeon software while in-game. It should automatically open to FFXVI's game-specific settings page.

From here, set Radeon Super Resolution to Enabled. (You may need to restart the game to apply)

You can adjust the sharpening here as you see fit. I recommend a higher value, somewhere between 80 and 90.

If you can't open Radeon Software with a keyboard shortcut, download and install the latest version from AMD's website[www.amd.com].

As fair as I know, nVidia and Intel cards don't have an equivalent to radeon super resolution.

You can use an external program called Lossless Scaling ($7 on Steam)[www.amd.com] to do the same thing.

1. Open FFXVI and Lossless Scaling

2. Set FFXVI to windowed mode in display settings. (Not borderless!)

3. In Lossless scaling, set the upscaler to FSR or LS1; increase the sharpness a bit.

4. Click "Scale" in Lossless Scaling, then click onto the FFXVI window within 5 seconds.

5. Enjoy! This will add a bit of latency compared to AMD's driver-level implementation, but will achieve the same results.

Using these settings, I was able to go from 20-30FPS in the Lostwing area to 60-80, with ~100FPS in most areas. Image quality is acceptable - comparable to a 1080p game with mediocre TAA on my 1440p screen, despite the messy upscaling setup.

I'd recommend using https://github.com/Lyall/FFXVIFix to allow framegen in cutscenes.

It's unfortunate that this game is so poorly optimized for lower-end systems. Hopefully we'll get a game update or another driver update with some extra settings, but for now this is the best we can achieve on these cards.