You may recall an event in 2012 wherein Square Enix showcased a beautiful tech demo called Agnis Philosophy. It was a rich, visually-astute vertical slice built around Final Fantasy motifs in order to showcase the brute force of the company’s in-house Luminous engine. Fast forward to 2015 and the Japanese giant has unveiled a modernized, more advanced version of the real-time demo harnessing the power of DirectX 12.
Revealed during Microsoft’s developer-centric Build conference, Square Enix revealed that the hardware that made this striking showcase possible is a combination of DirectX 12, Microsoft’s soon-to-be-released Windows 10, and no less than four Nvidia GeForce Titan X GPUs graphic cards. Quite the set-up, if we do say so ourselves, but the results are truly spectacular.
Entitled Witch Chapter 0 [cry], Square Game Director Hajime Tabata ran through the tech lurking behind the stunning pixels – performing at 8K by 8K, no less – and how this vertical slice will help influence the vision of the development team moving forward.
“Our team has always pursued cutting-edge pre-rendered and real-time CG. As a part of the technical development, we created this demo using world-class, real-time CG technology with generous support from leading-edge software and hardware providers – Microsoft’s Windows10/DirectX 12 and NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX. The efforts from this project will power future game development as well as FINAL FANTASY XV, currently a work in progress.”
By this stage, Final Fantasy and bleeding-edge visuals almost go hand in hand, with each new chapter in the company’s flagship series acting as a true visual showcase of the hardware its on. It’ll be interesting to see how this photorealistic approach pans out over the course of the franchise’s future, but you can certainly color us very excited about what Square Enix has in store.
Published: May 1, 2015 08:43 am