Deathloop PC Optimisation Guide

 

 

 

 

Conclusion  

Deathloop is a game that’s designed with the latest hardware in mind, and it offers few avenues towards higher framerates on PC. Any easy method towards increased performance has a catch, with only one major exception. 

CACAO is Deathloop’s primary Ambient Occlusion technology, and lowering this setting from Quality to Performance delivered a 10% increase in average framerate when playing Deathloop at 4K using an RTX 2080 Ti. No other graphical setting has such a positive performance impact, aside from AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution, which we will chat about later. 

The best graphics options to lower are Ambient Occlusion, Shadows, and Motion Blur if you need more performance. Beyond that, most gamers should probably look into resolution scaling and AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution technology. 

While AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) technology promises to deliver higher performance levels and near-native image quality levels, it fails to reach these quality levels within Deathloop. As we show on page 3 of this article, FSR’s image quality is far below a native resolution presentation, even at 4K. While it delivers a significant performance boost, it also comes with a notable image quality loss. 

While the performance gains offered by FSR will be worth it for many players, AMD’s technology is failing to live up to its promises in Deathloop. Even in the feature’s Ultra Quality Mode, FSR delivers a final image that is blurrier than a natively rendered image, even at 4K, where FSR works at its best. These are DLSS 1.0 quality levels, and many PC gamers expect better from AMD’s much-championed alternative to DLSS. I’d be surprised if there isn’t calls to add DLSS 2.0 to Deathloop from the game’s RTX using fanbase, as DLSS would likely deliver higher quality results than what FSR’s currently delivering. 

When it comes to Ray Tracing, Deathloop’s implementation of ray tracing is great, delivering strong visual enhancements and a lower toll than we expected on our RTX 2080 Ti. Setting ray-traced ambient occlusion to its performance mode gave us a minor performance reduction over the game’s default CACAO Quality option, making it an easy setting to enable within the game. This setting grounds objects into the game world and delivers significant improvements to Deathloop’s lighting. On top of that, the game’s ray-traced sun shadows can have a transformative impact on some areas of the game and deliver much better visuals than the game’s default shadow options. 

Deathloop is a game that most PC gamers will need to compromise on their “always ultra settings” mentality to play. Aside from a few useful performance scaling options, most PC gamers will benefit most from lowering Deathloop’s resolution using options like AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution feature. That said, performance gains will come with a loss in graphical clarity, though some sharpness loss can be regained using FidelityFX Contrast Adaptive Sharpening. 

(Regarding Stuttering) Right now, some PC gamers are suffering from stuttering issues when playing Deathloop on PC. We have suffered from this issue when playing the game. However, we didn’t face stuttering when we played the game for the first time. We only ever suffered issues after moving from gameplay to Deathloop’s main menu and back. We always were able to remove the game’s stuttering by exiting the game fully and then re-entering it. This isn’t a great workaround, but it did allow us to enjoy playing Deathloop. Bethesda has already confirmed that they are “actively investigating” Deathloop’s stuttering issues, which hopefully means that proper a fix will be released soon. 

You can join the discussion on Deathloop’s PC Performance on the OC3D Forums.