How to fix Deathloop “stuttering” issues on PC

Death loop is the big triple-A game right now, and it’s an amazing experience – assuming you’re not fighting your gaming PC to make it run smoothly. Bethesda is aware and a patch appears to be on the way. But as Digital foundry‘s Alex Battaglia explains in this in-depth video, there may be a few things you can try right now to fix it, including a weird and counterintuitive trick that instantly made my seemingly stuttering performance smooth.

Here is the TL; DR.

• Obvious: Reduce your quality settings
• Much less obvious: Try the beta fix: “juliannashotme” in Steam> Deathloop> Properties> Betas
• Counter intuitive : Lock your framerate to 60 or 120fps

Let’s start with the latter, because that’s what worked for me – and maybe it’s the only thing that works if you have a fancy G-Sync / FreeSync monitor with variable refresh rate. Just go to the game Video settings page, deactivate V-Sync entirely, and define your FPS limiter at 60 or, if your performance is high enough, at 120 fps.

You might be wondering, “Isn’t the point of V-Sync and my sophisticated VRR monitor in preventing this kind of stuttering from happening?” »Yes, but like Digital foundry explains, what you see has more to do with mouse movement than syncing your GPU frames with your monitor’s refresh rate. It’s not the tearing you see when frames hit in the middle of a refresh, or the micro-stutter you might have experienced when frames are delayed.

In fact, Battaglia shows that Death loop can deliver excellent frame times – there’s just a lag when you turn your digital character’s head at non-standard refresh rates, like those on your variable refresh monitor designed to supply. With an RTX 3080, my GPU could easily send 80 fps to my G-Sync monitor in many scenes at near 4K resolution, but locking it at 60 counterintuitively made everything much smoother.

Another thing you might want to do (although you also want to to cancel this after the next public patch: try the fix that Bethesda is currently asking users to help test. Right click on Death loop in your Steam library, select Properties then Beta, type Juliannashotme in the access code field, press Check the code, then and Register now the public_beta branch which should appear.

Digital foundry reports that the beta appears to iron out one of the mouse issues, although Battaglia still points out other issues in his full video, including an issue where you may have to quit a mission or start the next level before you can. it does not resolve itself.

Finally, you might just choose unnecessarily high graphics settings for a fairly demanding game. Death loop looks great at high detail levels, often with little noticeable difference from Very High or Ultra, as you can see in the video at the top of this article. Don’t hit it before you’ve tried it?