Tales of Arise PC Performance Analysis & Port Report

Conclusion – Tales of Arise is a great game that deserves more polish on PC

Tales of Arise is a great JRPG. There is a reason why the game had over 60,000 concurrent players when it launched last weekend on PC. If you are into anime-styled JRPGs, Tales of Arise is worth looking into. That said, the game’s PC version has some room for improvement. 

The move to Unreal Engine 4 has worked wonders for the Tales series, as Tales of Arise delivers some of the best anime-style visuals in gaming. Visually, Tales of Arise looks phenomenal, especially at high resolutions. The artist and developers at Bandai Namco deserve praise for that. 

One thing that PC gamers should know about Tales of Arise is that the game while the game has an unlimited framerate options and FPS limits that extend from 30 FPS to 144 FPS, Tales of Arise’s cutscenes and special attacks are limited to 60 FPS. This means that while you can walk across the game’s world at higher framerates, and while most of the game’s battles can be played at higher framerates, the game’s special attacks will force framerates down to 60FPS. Beyond that, Tales of Arise’s framerates are hugely variable. 

At 4K max settings, our Radeon RX 6800 graphics card can offer performance levels anywhere between 65 and 140 FPS depending on your location within the game. That is an insane level of framerate variation and a clear reason why many PC gamers will prefer to lock Takes of Arise at 60 FPS or invest in a variable refresh rate monitor.  

  
We started playing Tales of Arise using a 4K LG TV, which presented us with one of Tales of Arise’s most annoying bugs. Gamers who play Tales of Arise’s PC version of a 4K television will see the game lock itself to a fullscreen resolution of 4096×2160, giving gamers no option to play the game at a lower resolution. This bug has affected many PC gamers on Steam, most of whom appear to be playing the game on televisions, including LG’s 120Hz OLED models. 

Strangely, this bug appears to be exclusive to users of 4K televisions, and our testing confirms that this bug happens on both AMD and Nvidia graphics cards. This bug doesn’t appear to be impacting users of 4K monitors. Bandai Namco needs to patch this issue, as it prevents TV users from adjusting their game’s fullscreen resolution and prevents them from playing the game at a proper 3840 x 2160 resolution. 

Another problem with the game is that Tales of Arise’s Resolution Scale option is not granular enough to be useful. Options of 50%, 100% (native resolution), and 200% are not useful to most PC gamers. Playing Tales of Arise at 4K with a 50% resolution scale is equivalent to 1080p, and a 200% resolution scale at 4K is equivalent to an 8K internal resolution. Percentages between these values at 10% or 5% increments would make Tales of Arise’s resolution scaling options a lot more useful, giving PC gamers some much-needed performance scaling options. 

Moving onto graphical settings, we can say that while Tales of Arise has many graphical options, most of them have a minor impact on performance. This alone makes Tales of Arise’s lack of more granular resolution scaling even worse, as there is no single graphics option that can deliver a major framerate boost. 

Given Tales of Arise’s lack of good performance scaling options, aside from changing the game’s fullscreen resolution, technologies like AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution and Nvidia’s DLSS appear to be great performance-enhancing technologies that could be added to Tales of Arise. While adding these features post-launch is a big ask, it would make up for the game’s lack of good performance scaling graphics options. 

Speaking of graphical options, Tales of Arise’s graphical options menu is frustrating to access, requiring PC gamers to go through three separate menus to access. It cannot be accessed from the game’s main menu, and some players will likely need to use Google to find where it is located. Bandai Namco, please make Tales of Arise’s graphical options menu to a more accessible location, and please allow PC gamers to adjust their settings from the game’s main menu. 

  
When it comes to CPU performance, we found that Tales of Arise does not require much processing grunt to run well on PC. If anything, we found that poorly optimised memory can have a larger performance impact than moving from our Ryzen 9 3950X’s 16x core count to its locked-down quad-core configuration. Tales of Arise does not care how many CPU cores you have, only that your CPU cores and memory are decently powerful (more details are on page 3). 

GPU-wise, graphics cards like AMD’s RX 580 and Nvidia’s GTX 1060 6GB are enough to play Tales of Arise with a steady 60 FPS framerate at 1080p, and the same can be said for AMD’s RX Vega 56 and Nvidia’s RTX 2060 Super at 1440p. 

At 4K, Tales of Arise becomes a demanding PC title, requiring graphics cards like AMD’s RX 6800 or Nvidia’s RTX 3070 to run at steady 60 FPS framerates. That said, given the game’s hugely variable framerates, Tales of Arise will be averaging around 80 FPS with these cards with dips into the mid-60s and maximum framerates over well over 120 FPS in some scenes. Tales of Arise is a game that makes the most of variable refresh rate screens. 

While the game is not free of issues on PC, it is a fun JRPG that I know that I will be spending more time on. The game runs well on PC, assuming that you run the game at an appropriate resolution, and while we would like to see fixes to the game’s 4K TV bug and its lacklustre resolution scaling options, it is a cell optimised PC game that should run well on most systems. 

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