Luminous Engine

Luminous Studio 1.0

A demo of Luminous Studio was first shown in 2011.

Agni's Philosophy

A full reveal was shown at E3 2012 in a video created by Square Enix' CG department titled "Agni's Philosophy". The engine natively supports DirectX 11 and programmable shaders and was built to be future proof for use with the 8th generation of consoles while also supporting PC, Xbox 360, and PS3, and the developers were working on Wii, Wii U and Nintendo 3DS compatibility. The engine also incorporates Silicon Studio's Yebis post-processing effects middleware.

The Agni's Philosophy tech demo pushed 10 million polygons per scene, including 300,000 to 400,000 polygons per character. It also used 1.8 GB texture data per scene.

Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn

Final Fantasy XIV Online: A Realm Reborn uses a scaled-down adaptation of Luminous Studio. Final Fantasy XV is the first game to use the full Luminous Studio engine.

Luminous Studio 1.5

Final Fantasy XV

Final Fantasy XV is running on Square Enix's Luminous Studio graphics engine. Its demo will be using version 1.5 of the engine, while the final game will be using version 2.0 of the engine. It will be running at 1080p with 30 frames per second. Compared to the 20,000 polygons used for the Final Fantasy XIII characters, Final Fantasy XV will be using 100,000 polygons for its characters (around the same as The Order: 1886, Uncharted 4, and Star Citizen, but slightly less than Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor's Edge and inFamous: Second Son). Overall, Final Fantasy XV will be using 5 million polygons per frame, pushing 150 million polygons per second. [ref] This is one of the highest polygon counts known for a video game.

Each character model will be using 20,000 to 30,000 polygons just for the hair alone, [ref] more than any other video game, and the same as the polygon count for an entire Final Fantasy XIII character. The game uses an advanced hair physics engine that is rendered using techniques such as tesselation, NURBS, and a new technique where a professional hair stylist creates the hairstyles in real life using mannequins which are then rendered for an in-game character model.

Each character will also have 600 bones, twelve times more than the 50 bones used by most PS3 and Xbox 360 games, and the highest known for a video game so far (more than Ryse: Son of Rome and inFamous: Second Son). Final Fantasy XV also uses 30 MB textures for each character [ref] (in comparison, inFamous: Second Son uses up to 28 MB for a character).

Comparison screenshots between Final Fantasy XV's real-time gameplay and pre-rendered CGI appear to show the real-time gameplay graphics screenshot coming close to the quality of the pre-rendered CGI screenshot. [ref] This level of almost CGI-like realism is mainly achieved through features such as physically based rendering and a robust global illumination solution.^[1] The engine uses a form of real-time global illumination,^[2] specifically fast global illumination baking via ray-bundle tracing, an efficient lighting technique capable of a performance of 200 million rays per second on a GeForce GTX 580 graphics card. [ref]

Witch Chapter 0

In April 2015, Square Enix announced the engine's support for DirectX12, and revealed a new tech demo running on the engine called Witch Chapter 0 [cry], featuring the character Agni from the Agni's Philosophy tech demo. It renders over 63 million polygons per frame, with the use of very high 8192x8192 resolution textures. The hair is rendered with over 50 shaders, and each strand of hair is rendered with polygons. It portrays human crying at a level of quality never seen before with a real-time 3D character.^[3] It runs on a powerful PC equipped with four GTX Titan X graphics cards. This tech demo, which took a year to produce, is considered to have the most advanced real-time graphics to date.