FFXIV poor performance outlier on new Radeon 9070 XT cards!?

[s32ialx]

Gamers Nexus is one of the very few who test Dawntrail.
Steve deserves an award for helping quite a few of us dodge a major headache today.

Theres no reason a card released less than 12 hours ago should run this game worse than mid ranged cards from two entire generations ago.

9800x3d with 9070 XT pulling 2080 super levels of frames is pretty sad to see.

Given what I'm seeing on my system and the fact that the FF14 result is an anomaly in GN's test suite I don't think it's the card's fault, or even AMD's, I'm inclined to believe something is afoot with the game. What really surprises me though is the fact that they make a PS4 version of the game which itself has a custom AMD GPU so you'd think that FF14 would be properly tested and optimised for AMD's CPU and GPU architectures.

In every other game 9070 XT is making 5070 Ti look like an absolute pathetic joke (in terms of cost per frame). It's just FF14 that's different. And potentially it could be fixed with drivers. Most people are still far, far better off buying 9070 XT rather than 5070Ti/5080, especially since the former is actually in stock at MSRP.

I'm starting to think it might be DX 11 and Nvidia Gameworks that is the culprit based on this thread https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/463738

I found out there is a way to force vulkan swapping out the dxgi.dll and adding a few other vulkan dll's (the ones people are using to make FFXIV work on Linux actually) and suddenly after a werid graphical lighting error that just stopped happening and everything was peachy keen I started instantly getting 165FPS almost solid no matter what I was doing save a few things where it was still high 80's low 100's

[s32ialx]

Well it was better but as soon as I went to a venue with >20 people it tanked to 10>

[Rinoa_353]

I believe it may just be the drivers that need to be optimized for the game. For example, I play on an ASUS RoG Ally Z1E and when I first got it back in 2023, the game struggled on the 30 watt turbo mode at 720p getting 30 fps or lower for the low end laptop settings. Now in 2025, I can play the game at the 10 watt silent mode averaging 30 fps or more at 720p medium settings. Since I play the game docked mostly, then the Ally can handle the game at 900p medium settings and average 45 fps or more on a custom 18 watt profile. So I am confident AMD will improve the drivers over the course of the lifetime of the 9070 XT like they did with the AMD Z1 Extreme APU.

[Johners]

Would be nice if Square Enix could support something newer than FSR1 for FFXIV. FSR3 at the very least but also FSR4 for owners of the latest AMD GPUs would be a huge improvement. Even more so when the current DLSS implementation is much newer plus you can force the latest reconstruction models in the NVIDIA App for considerably better image quality.

[jotoho]

Would be nice if Square Enix could support something newer than FSR1 for FFXIV. FSR3 at the very least but also FSR4 for owners of the latest AMD GPUs would be a huge improvement. Even more so when the current DLSS implementation is much newer plus you can force the latest reconstruction models in the NVIDIA App for considerably better image quality.

If I remember correctly, FSR versions newer than FSR1 do not support old versions of DirectX. So in order to implement them, the game engine's graphics tech would need to be rewritten to DX12 or Vulkan, which I don't see happening, because of how much work that would be.
(Personally, I'd prefer FF14 to use Vulkan since that would also mean DirectX calls would no longer need to be translated on Linux)

[BelegErkhten]

The game still works with my 1060ti

[s32ialx]

I believe it may just be the drivers that need to be optimized for the game. For example, I play on an ASUS RoG Ally Z1E and when I first got it back in 2023, the game struggled on the 30 watt turbo mode at 720p getting 30 fps or lower for the low end laptop settings. Now in 2025, I can play the game at the 10 watt silent mode averaging 30 fps or more at 720p medium settings. Since I play the game docked mostly, then the Ally can handle the game at 900p medium settings and average 45 fps or more on a custom 18 watt profile. So I am confident AMD will improve the drivers over the course of the lifetime of the 9070 XT like they did with the AMD Z1 Extreme APU.

Yeah I just hope they figure it out sooner than later cause with swapping out DX11 with Vulkan is definitely leaps better than with DX 11, but with in certain situations it acts like how the 50 series cards with with 32bit physx, they dropped support for 32 physx in the 50 series so they struggle to play old games that use it.

Would be nice if Square Enix could support something newer than FSR1 for FFXIV. FSR3 at the very least but also FSR4 for owners of the latest AMD GPUs would be a huge improvement. Even more so when the current DLSS implementation is much newer plus you can force the latest reconstruction models in the NVIDIA App for considerably better image quality.

They need to do more than that, they need to drop nvidia gameworks and dx 11 and update to DX12 and vulkan.

The game still works with my 1060ti

haha I remember having one of those to play back in like 2016 or 2017 before that I played on a 750ti

[s32ialx]

It’s greyed out because you have an AMD GPU, and therefore cannot select DLSS. And FSR won’t kick in unless you set the resolution scaling to less than 100. It’s a tad confusing but FSR at 100 resolution scale is just running the game natively without any upscaling.

OHH that makes more sense, they should have an off option not just "set it to 100" I get that that is technically off but there should be a fully off option.

[Cubester]

OHH that makes more sense, they should have an off option not just "set it to 100" I get that that is technically off but there should be a fully off option.

I'm not sure if it's okay to mention it here, but there are also mods that allow you to enable FSR 3.1 (and maybe FSR 4 in the future) because the game only supports FSR 1 by default.

I haven't tried it myself though because I have an Nvidia GPU.

[s32ialx]

TLDR; Unless square fixes it, we're not getting a fix.

I'm not sure if it's okay to mention it here, but there are also mods that allow you to enable FSR 3.1 (and maybe FSR 4 in the future) because the game only supports FSR 1 by default.

I haven't tried it myself though because I have an Nvidia GPU.

Oh interesting, but I shouldn't need FSR on FFXIV considering how old the graphics engine is, However I contacted AMD and they had this to say:

Thank you for getting in contact with amd's customer support team. We’re sorry to hear about the performance issues you're experiencing with Final Fantasy 14 on your RX 9070 XT. It's important to note that older games can sometimes have compatibility issues with newer hardware due to several factors such as APIs, operating systems, and compatible drivers.

If this is the only game you're facing performance issues with, we recommend reaching out to the game’s developers, as this is more related to game optimization. Since Final Fantasy 14 still uses DX11 and certain Nvidia technologies, the developers may need to make adjustments to improve compatibility with modern hardware.

If I remember correctly, FSR versions newer than FSR1 do not support old versions of DirectX. So in order to implement them, the game engine's graphics tech would need to be rewritten to DX12 or Vulkan, which I don't see happening, because of how much work that would be.
(Personally, I'd prefer FF14 to use Vulkan since that would also mean DirectX calls would no longer need to be translated on Linux)

I am making FF14 use Vulkan because it's the only way I can get best performance from, following a guide on how to replace teh DX 11 DXGI.dll to a vulkan compatible one the same one Linux users are using. > Using DXVK on Windows to improve Final Fantasy XIV performance