Status at day 2: performance complaints are one of the two largest clusters in the official Steam bug thread, alongside display and aspect-ratio issues. A publisher community manager confirmed on August 5 that the team is planning the first patch for PC-specific fixes, with timing not yet announced. Nothing on this page is a substitute for that patch — it's what you can do in the meantime.

First: check your upscaler is still set to what you chose

This is the highest-value thing on the page because it is a confirmed bug and it silently costs you frames.

Multiple players in the official bug thread report that the upscaling option reverts from DLSS back to AMD FSR 1 after closing and reopening the game, regardless of what was saved. FSR 1 is a spatial upscaler and looks and performs materially worse than DLSS on an NVIDIA card. If you set DLSS on Monday and have been playing since, there's a good chance you've been running FSR 1 without knowing.

What to do: open the graphics settings at the start of every session and re-select your upscaler before judging performance. There is no known permanent fix — it's on the list for the first PC patch.

Confirmed and reported performance issues

Issue	Reported on	Status / source
Upscaler resets from DLSS to FSR 1 between sessions	PC (NVIDIA)	Multiple independent reports — official Steam bug thread, Aug 4–5
Heavy frame drops during explosions and effect-dense combat, including on an RTX 5070 Ti at 1440p on low settings with ray tracing off	PC	Reported in the official bug thread, Aug 5 — not reproduced by us
Persistent hitching described as unplayable on an RTX 4070 Ti / Ryzen 7 7700X / 32 GB system in the opening area	PC	Reported in the official bug thread, Aug 5 — not reproduced by us
Localised drops to roughly 30 FPS in specific areas	PC	Reported in the official bug thread, Aug 5
No vendor game-ready driver naming this title as of day 2	PC (NVIDIA/AMD)	Player observation in the official bug thread, Aug 5 — plausible but unverified as a cause; see below
Frame drops, tearing and pop-in on console	PS5 / PS5 Pro	Flagged in launch reviews (Pragalicious, PSX Brasil), Aug 3–4

About the "no game-ready driver" claim

A widely-upvoted forum argument holds that the performance problems come down to NVIDIA and AMD not having shipped a driver profile tuned for this release, which is why high-end cards appear to be brute-forcing it. That is a reasonable hypothesis and the underlying fact — no driver release notes naming the game at launch — is easy to check yourself. But it is a player's explanation, not a vendor or developer statement, and it does not account for the reports on AMD hardware. We're listing it because you'll see it repeated everywhere; treat it as a theory, not a diagnosis.

What's normal Unreal Engine 5 behaviour (and not a bug)

First-session hitching as you enter new areas. UE5 compiles shaders on the fly. The first hour is the worst hour. If you force-quit during compilation, verify your files and let it finish cleanly.
Traversal stutter on a mechanical drive. The official requirements specify an SSD. This isn't optional guidance — streaming a world of this density from an HDD produces exactly the periodic freeze people describe. See the full requirements.
Ray tracing being expensive. Pre-release benchmark coverage showed the game running well with ray tracing enabled on high-end cards, but it remains the single most expensive toggle. Turn it off first.

Troubleshooting order that's worth your time

Re-check the upscaler (see above). Set DLSS or FSR to Quality rather than leaving whatever the game reverted to.
Turn ray tracing off and retest before touching anything else. Biggest single lever.
Install the newest GPU driver, and do a clean install if you're jumping several versions. Even without a title-specific profile, a current driver removes one variable.
Cap your frame rate slightly below what your system can sustain — a stable 45 feels far better than a 60 that collapses to 25 in combat. Use the in-game limiter or your driver's frame limiter rather than plain V-Sync.
Lower shadows and effects density next. Reporters consistently point at particle-heavy moments, not at texture resolution.
Disable overlays — Discord, Steam, NVIDIA App, MSI Afterburner and RGB utilities. Turn them off one at a time so you learn which one it was.
Verify game files in Steam if hitching is accompanied by texture pop-in or missing assets, which can indicate an incomplete download.
Confirm the game is on your SSD, not a secondary HDD you set as the default Steam library years ago.

For per-GPU targets and the community benchmark numbers we've collected, see the best settings guide. If the game doesn't start at all rather than running badly, go to the crash on launch guide instead.

Where to report yours (and make it count)

The developers are actively reading and replying in the official Steam bug thread — a community manager has posted in it repeatedly since launch day. A performance report is far more actionable with your GPU, exact driver version, CPU, RAM, resolution, upscaler setting, whether ray tracing is on, and whether the drop is constant or tied to a specific effect or area.

Related guides

Sources

Steam Community — official pinned "Bug Reports and Technical Issues" thread (149 posts at time of reading; DLSS/FSR reset reports, RTX 5070 Ti and 4070 Ti performance reports, driver discussion, and the developer post on the planned first PC patch; read Aug 5, 2026)
Steam — official launch announcement (PC build reports version 1.0.6; read Aug 5, 2026)
Steam — store page (official system requirements including the SSD requirement; read Aug 5, 2026)
OpenCritic — review list (console frame-rate criticism in launch reviews; read Aug 4, 2026)

Transparency: this page compiles official developer statements and attributed player reports. We do not own the game and are not reporting first-hand benchmarking. Individual hardware reports are labelled as reports, not as reproduced results.