NieR Replicant PC Port Report and Performance Review

Fixing the game – Enter Special K

When we started playing NieR Replicant, we were disappointed by how poorly the game ran on our test PC. With an RTX 3070, the game frequently sat at framerates of between 40 and 55 FPS at 4K, with reported GPU clock speeds that are lower than 1,000MHz and single CPU cores on our Ryzen 9 3950X that were running at 100% load. 

Something was clearly wrong, and based on the chatter that we found on Steam’s forums, we were not the only PC players to face performance issues. Strangely, many of these performance issues disappeared at lower resolutions, though frametime issues persisted. 

An early report from Kaldaien, a prominent PC modder, claimed that NieR Replicant contains “b0rked gamepad code”, alongside other issues. In this report, a PC game modification tool called “Special K” was recommended, and instructions on the mod’s Discord page were already available to allow PCs to achieve more stable performance when playing NieR Replicant.  

Please note that ideal settings within Special K will change depending on your PC’s hardware configuration. That said, we followed the Discord group‘s recommendations and were able to achieve a fairly solid 60 FPS framerate lock at 4K on our RTX 3070 graphics card. 

Before using Special K, our framerate moved between around 45 FPS and 53 FPS. Afterwards, we were mostly at 60 FPS with a few minor dips. As we will detail on page 5, these performance dips are not because of Special K. 
  

  

For the most part, we ran Special K in its stock configuration, making the red boxed changes to NieR Replicant to make the game stable on our test system. These settings work on both AMD and Nvidia hardware configurations and were able to give us stable 60 FPS framerates on most of the hardware that we tested, at least when our GPUs were powerful enough to hit that performance target. 

For the latest instructions for using Special K on NieR Replicant, head over to the Special K Discord page.