Outriders Performance Issues Reported with Full Release

Gamers have been eagerly rushing towards the beautiful world of Enoch to save the last remnants of humanity in Outriders. For PC players, however, the planet doesn't seem as attractive as it was in the demo.

Within the Outriders demo, the title managed to maintain a stable 60 fps in the vast majority of engagements, only partially dropping down to the low 50s – depending on a users systems specs, of course. Lower-end GPUs were able to handle the ultra graphic settings of the game at a standard 1920 x 1080p resolution. The full Outriders title released for PC players on April 1, and some reports may be concerning.

Performance issues have been reported in the full release of Outriders, stemming from a wide range of PC components that far overreach the minimum requirements to play the title. Nvidia released "Game Ready Drivers" last night in preparation for the release, yet it seems to have done little to mitigate the stuttering and sudden frame drops within the title. These performance problems are not reported on consoles, implying the existence of a PC-exclusive optimization issue. Some may have anticipated this after People Can Fly announced that it recommends a GTX 3080 for Outriders on Ultra settings.

However, the minimum requirements for Outriders state a recommended GTX 750 Ti for the lowest possible settings, and a GTX 1070 8GB for recommended specs. The GTX 1070 struggles with the title on the lowest settings, as it is currently released, including the "Game Ready Drivers" from Nvidia. Reports have arisen from 2080 owners as well, stating that gamers are struggling to maintain solid framerate, which consistently dips below 60 FPS on lower settings. One user stated they were using the recommended 3080, and still notes consistent stuttering through gameplay.

Some users have reported that shifting from DirectX 12 to DirectX 11 would mitigate the amount of stuttering - this was not replicated in local testing, however. The stuttering does threaten to bring with it a few avoidable deaths for players eager to explore the world of Enoch as soon as possible. People Can Fly has been transparent regarding the ongoing development and what fans should expect from the title on the Outriders subreddit: within the subreddit, the studio acknowledges PC problems with stuttering and frame rate issues. People Can Fly similarly points to issues with DirectX 12, however, and a hard crash to desktop due to overloaded CPUs.

The thread on Reddit, posted by Square Enix, offers a multitude of possible fixes to stuttering. While the fixes will take some time to work through, and players need to be able to join the overloaded Outriders servers, a solution is viable. Unfortunately, if the proposed fixes haven't mitigated the heartache, then the next fix is to simply wait until the title is in a more playable state.

Despite being published by Square Enix, the makers of Final Fantasy, Outriders is truly is in a category of its own. The co-op RPG has already been successful as a demo for months now, so when the game debuted on April 1st, 2021, fans of the genre knew what to expect.