A few Square Enix developers were interviewed on the official Unreal Engine blog to disclose how Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade took advantage of the PlayStation 5 console.
Lead Technical Programmer Tomohito Hano explained how the load times were drastically diminished between hardware and software improvements.
With PS5 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 so that it would 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.
Square Enix also had to circumvent PS5's disc capacity limitations in order to inject high-resolution textures into Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade.
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 PS5 version, even taking the higher resolution textures into account.
Plus, the increased memory compared to PS4 and the improvement of the Non Streamable Mip Map, which ties into the response of the aforementioned question, also helped to load textures.
We were also able to use more high-resolution light maps, which improved the accuracy of the lighting.
Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade is currently available on PlayStation 5 (and PlayStation 4, albeit without the next-gen enhancements). However, a recent leak suggests it may be released on PC sooner than later via the Epic Games Store.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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