Deathloop has just launched to almost universal critical praise – including our own – but it seems like the PC port is experiencing some performance issues. But, at least Bethesda is working on it.
The issues seem to center around stuttering, particularly when playing at higher framerates. This is understandably frustrating for a first-person shooter that is all about fast-paced action like Deathloop. Luckily, a Bethesda Community Manager responded to a complaint on Reddit, saying that the developers are actively investigating the issue and that it's a priority.
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But it seems like the issues are pretty widespread. The Deathloop subreddit is topped with performance and crash issues. Luckily, right now, user u/ItsCigThirty has detailed a fix for the microstuttering issue. And if you're running into the issue on a high-refresh rate monitor, limiting the framerate to 60 might be the best way to alleviate the issue for now. There's more to their fix, so we recommend going to their post and trying it out for yourself.
We haven't run into this issue ourselves in our limited time with the PC version of the game, and we are playing it on the Samsung Neo G9, which is also a high-refresh display.
A lot of the comments on Reddit about this port seem to point to Denuvo as the culprit, but nothing has been confirmed as of yet. So, it's probably best to wait until Bethesda puts out a patch to fix the issue. And, until then, you might want to pick it up on PS5 instead of PC if you're not interested in tinkering with the game to make it run well.
Opinion: a blight on what seemed like a good port
When we reviewed Deathloop for TechRadar, it was on PS5, so the full review obviously didn't run into any of these issues. But I have played the Deathloop PC port for about an hour, and it's been running like a dream so far. With that low of a playtime, I cannot definitively say the port is good or not, but I have liked what I've seen.
It supports the bananas 32:9 ultrawide resolution of the monitor I'm using right now, and even supports both Nvidia Reflex and AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution, which is definitely a combination I didn't see coming. Not to mention there's a wealth of settings that make it easy to tweak the game to your liking.
However, I'm going to have to try and replicate these issues, just because I can't leave anything like this alone. One of the biggest things that attracts people to PC gaming these days is the fact that it's so flexible and being able to play games at a high refresh rate is incredibly important to a lot of PC players.
While I might only be an hour into the game, one of my favorite things to do already is mess up stealth because I'm impatient, and then immediately panicking and gunning down everything in sight. And I've been able to do that around 90-110 fps most of the time, which has made it even more enjoyable.
So there might be a solution out there that fixes the stuttering by limiting the framerate down to 60 fps, but that's no way to play Deathloop, especially if you have the hardware to actually run the game at a high framerate. Hopefully Bethesda is able to figure out the culprit and get it fixed ASAP, because this is definitely a game where a higher framerate is definitely going to benefit the experience.
