FINAL FANTASY XIII – How to play on Windows 10 for Radeon 5000, 6000 series RDNA / RDNA2 cards

Intro

After trying several methods of playing this game on my RX 6800 I have finally found a way to play it in a 100% stable environment and with pretty good performance. I found reports of people having issues with DXVK (which was my case), but I believe I have finally found a solution.

What we are going to do: We are going to have Final Fantasy XIII running with DXVK (Vulkan renderer) instead of DirectX 9. This is because this game is unstable on Windows 10. The primarily reason I am making this guide is because many people trying to play this game again bought an RDNA card but are now stumbling upon an unstable (and quite frankly, ancient) game. I want to make it clear that there are ALSO reports of this game crashing (in the same fashion) on NVIDIA users, and reports of the game working fine on Windows 7 with RDNA as well. Thus, one cannot simply call it an “AMD driver issue” at this moment in time, and it should not detract you from getting a Radeon card (they’re beautiful pieces of hardware). On to the guide!

Requirements

• One unpatched copy of Final Fantasy XII. If you have FF13 fix, GEDOSATO or anything of the sort, please remove them before proceeding or DELETE the FF13 steam folder AND re-install the game. These mods are not going to be compatible with DXVK and can cause severe graphical glitches. I did not test the language changer, but I am afraid it might also not be compatible. On the bright side, RDNA cards are powerful enough to not have severe stuttering.
• Run the game at least once, so it is registered in Radeon software.
• 7z archiver. It is free and we will need it to unpack DXVK.
• Optional: Enable VSR in Radeon software to allow for 4K resolutions if your monitor is 1440p or lower. This is if you wish to render the game at a 4K resolution for higher quality visuals.

Step 1

Uninstall MSI Afterburner and Rivatuner Statistics Server (RTSS) from your system. Delete any performance monitoring apps (CapFrameX, etc) to be on the safe side.

Why: RTSS hooks itself into all of your Vulkan applications, even when it is not running. This can cause severe isssues on DXVK in certain instances (see github.com – https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/issues/1336). The reason most people have crashes in FF13 while using DXVK is because they are using RTSS to monitor whether DXVK is working or not. Instead of doing this, we are going to use the DXVK statistics to make sure it is running and track our performance (but this is optional)

OPTIONAL STEP: Let us activate the DXVK statistics. On Windows 10, please go into System Properties and go to the Advanced tab. Click on “Environment variables”. In the “System variables” lower section, select “New” and add a variable with the name “DXVK_HUD” and set the value to “1”.

This variable will tell all of our DXVK patched games to display the statistics. Please use this instead of RTSS. If you use DXVK on Windows, do not install Rivatuner Statistics Server or other FPS monitoring software.

Step 2

We download the async patched DXVK (credit to Fallenstar for recommending this version in a Steam community thread). First, let us go into the github.com – https://github.com/Sporif/dxvk-async​.

On the right hand-side of the webpage, select “Releases”.

In this page, look at the a*sets tab, and download the .tar.gz package (in my case, “dxvk-async-1.8.1.tar.gz”).

Once it is downloaded, right click the file and select “Open Archive” with the 7z context menu. Once you open it, 7z will show another .tar file inside (in my case, “dxvk-async-1.8.1.tar”). Double click this file. You should now see a folder (“dxvk-async-1.8.1” in my case).

Enter this folder and copy the contents of the “x32” folder (a bunch of DLLs)…

…into the executable folder of FF13.

On Steam, this folder is located here:

\steamapps\common\FINAL FANTASY XIII\white_data\prog\win\bin

and the main executable of FF13 is called “ffxiiiimg.exe”. If done correctly, the folder containing “ffxiiiimg.exe” should have d3d9.dll all the way to d3d11.dll and dxgi.dll (as above).

Please make sure you copy the contents of the x32 folder and NOT the x64 folder. FF13 is a 32-bit application, so we need the 32-bit version of DXVK. This completes all the setup required for the game.

Why async: It has slightly better performance than regular DXVK, and produces less stutter for me.

Step 3

We are going to prevent our RDNA card from downclocking too hard, this makes the game run at a stable 60 fps.

Why: The normal Radeon profile is for the DX9 version of FF13. Since we replaced that with Vulkan, we need to provide our own alternative. FF13 is weird, and it seems to like stable GPU clock speeds.

Open the Radeon Software and select “Final Fantasy XIII” in your list of games.

In this menu, please select “Tune game performance”.

– In “Tuning Control” select “Manual” and then enable “GPU Tuning”.
– Enable advanced control and please dial a “Min Frequency” of 1000 mhz. The “Max Frequency” can remain untouched.
– (OPTIONAL) If you wish to do an undervolt, please dial it in at this time. However, FF13 will not push your card hard.

This finishes our setup in Radeon software.

Step 4

Enjoy the game! My settings:

– Japanese voice
– 3840×2160
– 16x MSAA
– 4x shadow maps.

Slight stutters are due to shader compilation, they go away with time.

Hope you enjoy the Guide about FINAL FANTASY XIII – How to play on Windows 10 for Radeon 5000, 6000 series RDNA / RDNA2 cards, if you think we should add extra information or forget something, please let us know via comment below, and we will do our best to fix or update as soon as possible!