The Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade PlayStation 5-exclusive version of the game (which launched nearly two months ago and has a different story not available on PlayStation 4) got some technical upgrades that have utilized the new hardware’s extra power.

Tomohito Hano, the lead technical programmer of Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade, was interviewed on the Unreal Engine blog to explain how Square Enix tuned up the game for the new console: “With PlayStation 5 having an SSD, I/O speeds were no longer a bottleneck. Instead, time slicing and CPU load became the causes for longer load times.

Because of that, we improved the load flow by doing things like putting in unique serialization to lessen the load during deserialization in areas especially prone to bottlenecks. Through these efforts, we were able to go from approximately 12 second load times down to six. While we were exploring options for further improvement, we realized the loader was inefficient. So, we integrated Unversioned Property Serialization and IOStore, which were introduced with Unreal Engine 4.25.

This title was developed based on UE 4.18, so it required some changes, but because of the implementations, we were able to shorten the time to about two seconds, so I feel that this brought improvement that was well worth the investment,” Hano said.

They also had to overcome a disc capacity limitation: “In the PlayStation 4 version, we had to forgo using a higher-quality format and high-resolution textures due to memory and disc capacity restrictions. However, we still didn’t have enough disc capacity with FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE INTERGRADE to include a high-quality format and high-resolution textures.

And so, we integrated Oodle Texture [Compression], and by using it in combination with Oodle Kraken, we were able to achieve a smaller file size on the PlayStation 5 version, even taking the higher resolution textures into account. Plus, the increased memory compared to [the] PlayStation 4 and the improvement of the Non-Streamable Mip Map, which ties into the previous question’s response, also helped to load textures. We were also able to use more high-resolution lightmaps, which improved the accuracy of the lighting,” Hano added.

We just started a new console generation, and we already have disc limitation issues…?

Source: WCCFTech