When Climax and Housemarque launched Returnal PC in the second half of February, we were forced to criticize the near-constant stuttering encountered when playing the game, especially when moving toward new zones and with ray tracing enabled.
While the game compiles shaders the first time you launch it, stuttering is everpresent, despite not being picked up by the in-game metrics or benchmark. It’s there not only in the thickest of combat, where it is most annoying but slightly more understandable due to all the particles flying around, but also when you’re just moving throughout the environment on your own, with nothing else going on.
You can check out the stuttering in action in the co-op gameplay capture below. The in-game metrics are enabled on the left, showing a constantly high frame rate. On the right, however, NVIDIA FrameView shows a different story, with the 1% Low dropping to 50FPS or lower on a fairly regular basis. This provides a very inconsistent experience that is quite damaging when actually playing, given the challenging, fast-paced bullet-hell shooter type of gameplay. You certainly don’t want stutters to catch you at the wrong time in a game like Returnal, where you often need to dodge multiple projectiles with near-perfect timing lest the whole cycle run go to waste.
It was a shame, too, because the port was otherwise great. The visuals were far improved from the PlayStation 5 version, for instance. Returnal PC also supports every single noteworthy feature from Ultrawide/Super Ultrawide displays to HDR, ray tracing, NVIDIA DLSS 2 and AMD FSR2, Dolby Atmos, and DualSense controllers.
Luckily, the developers have been working on a fix, which has now been released via a 590MB patch. CPUs with less than eight cores have been optimized to reduce stuttering, and the PSO (Pipeline State Object) system has been updated to lessen stuttering with ray tracing activated.
The changelog also includes the following fixes to Returnal PC:
- Fixed crash that can occur when finding or using translocators.
- Fixed crash that can occur during various combat or high particle effect situations.
- Enabled Intel’s XeSS screen scaling technology on non-Intel hardware.
- Fixed blocker that can occur when killing the Typhonops and using a Reconstructor.
- Fixed 3840×1600 resolutions not displaying correctly.
- Fixed Steam overlay run time being out of sync with in-game cycle time.
- Optimised installation process to reduce file size.
Another patch is on the way with additional performance enhancements, a fix for the Translocators bug, and fixes for the co-op experience.
