Final Fantasy 16 has problems on PC — but this free mod fixes them

By Jacob Roach Published September 18, 2024

After more than a year, Final Fantasy 16 is available on PC, but it isn’t off to the best start. Although the game is sitting at a Very Positive rating on Steam, several of the reviews take into an account an unofficial mod for the game that fixes various aspects of the PC port. It’s called FFXVIFix, and you can download it for free on GitHub.

The big fix included in the mod is that it disbales the 30 frames per second (fps) cap that the game places on cutscenes and photo mode. It was something we noticed in our first look at the game on PC earlier this month. The game doesn’t apply the 30 fps cap universally, creating a jarring experience as you bounce through a series of cutscenes early on in the game. With this fix, you don’t have to worry about that.

Beyond disabling the frame rate cap, the mod also comes with proper ultrawide (21:9 or 32:9 aspect ratios) support. The game itself technically supports these aspect ratios, and it will render the game properly to them. Strangely, however, it still uses black bars to crop the game to a 16:9 aspect ratio. The mod gets rid of the black bars, as well as fixes the HUD and field of view scaling when using a unique aspect ratio.

Those are the two main fixes in the mod, but it includes several other small tweaks as well. You can adjust the field of view during gameplay, for example, as well as use DLSS 3 Frame Generation during cutscenes. If you’re into the photo mode, the mod includes a JXL option for taking screenshots, offering a higher-quality snapshot.

Although Final Fantasy 16 has a few problems on PC, it’s still packing a ton of PC-exclusive features. In addition to DLSS 3, the game supports AMD’s FSR 3, and Nvidia’s Deep Learning Anti-Aliasing (DLAA). We also saw the game scaling very well on the CPU, occupying each of 16 threads with between 30% and 50% utilization, which is a positive sign. Games that stress only a few threads typically run into major stuttering issues.

Final Fantasy 16 was one of the standout releases last year, though as you can read in our Final Fantasy 16 review, the epic RPG suffers from uneven pacing and bare-bones sidequests, which can distract from its bombastic battles and dense political story.