Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth’s Graphical Problems Are Clear in Digital Foundry Report

Much like Final Fantasy 7 Remake, the freshly released Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth has its fair share of frankly jarring graphical issues. As noted in our review, the game as a whole can be very pretty — especially when you’re looking out across the countryside or watching one of the title’s many amazing cutscenes — but dig a little deeper, and it’s certainly not what you’d expect from a PS5 exclusive.

Digital Foundry’s report on the RPG lays it all out rather well. In terms of art direction and overall visual identity, it’s a good looking release — but it’s deeply flawed on a technical level. “Unfortunately, there are some areas where Rebirth is just treading water relative to its four-year old predecessor — and quite a few spots where we’ve actually seen a step back,” the report reads.

It goes on to highlight some notable issues, which include incredibly flat or completely missing lighting techniques, shockingly blurry shadows — something Remake did much better, apparently — and loads of seriously low quality textures. “FF7 Remake had a lot of issues with texturing in its PS4 incarnation, but Intergrade on PS5 mostly solved these issues. For Rebirth though, there’s a bizarre mixture of low and high resolution assets,” the analysis continues.

Fortunately, Rebirth runs well — at least in terms of frame rate. It’s a near locked 30fps when you’re using Graphics mode, and a fairly consistent 60fps in Performance mode. The only downside is that resolution is dynamic regardless of the visual setting you choose. Graphics has dynamic 4K, while Performance is stuck with a muddy dynamic resolution average of 1152p. No wonder it looks so blurry at times.

It’s a shame that this sort of stuff couldn’t be better optimised — especially since Rebirth doesn’t have to worry about running on old PS4 hardware. Again, it really is a game of visual highs and lows on a near constant basis.