After four years in development, Square Enix launched the long-awaited Outriders at the start of April this year.
It has proven to be extremely popular, but one of the side effects of that popularity is that it has thrown up a few issues. Of course, with any hugely popular online game, you can probably expect problems with the servers crashing. But the issue we are discussing today seems to be exclusively affecting players on PC.
So what is the problem, and what can you do about it? Read on, and we'll give you some pointers to help try to resolve the problem.
What is the issue?
Game stuttering and FPS drops is a rendering problem, where the image on your screen suddenly changes. This is often caused when the GPU or CPU slows down just enough to delay the rendering of a frame. If the frame takes too long to render, the GPU may skip the frame entirely. This type of issue occurs most commonly in areas that are very busy - so congested scenes, or fights, for example, where the load on the GPU is at its greatest.
The good news is that this issue was quickly identified, and the developers quickly developed a workaround to help resolve the problem, which they published on the Steam Community forum. Here is everything you need to know.
How do I fix it?
The problem seems to have stemmed from an issue with DirectX 12, causing the CPU to be overloaded. The potential workaround is as follows:
- Select the Play Outriders - DirectX 11 launch option when starting the game.
- If you have the latest Nvidia Game Ready installed, they have suggested that you revert to the previous version, to see if this fixes the issue.
In addition, there are some further suggestions:
- Disable Ansel (a tool for capturing in-game images)
- Disable DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) which is actually intended to boost frame rates
- Turn Vsync off
- Enable your FPS limiter and try different limits to see if that makes a difference
- Ensure controller configuration is supported
- Finally, you can try excluding the outriders game folder in Windows Defender
The developers also highlighted that sometimes stuttering can occur when entering a new area for the first time, encounter new enemies or new powers. They have also said that in this instance, it should only happen the first time, after which visits will be stutter-free. Work is being done to try to stop these issues from happening, and hopefully soon these problems will be a distant memory.