Are you looking to fix the deathloop stuttering issues on your PC, then make sure you read this article down. Deathloop is the big triple-A game of the moment, and it’s an amazing experience assuming you’re not fighting your gaming PC to get it to run smoothly.
According to THEVERGE, Bethesda is aware, and a patch seems 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 one weird, counterintuitive trick that instantly made my seemingly stuttery performance smooth.
How to Fix the Deathloop Stuttering Issues on PC
Bethesda says the patch “addresses an issue experienced by some players on PC whereby mouse-based camera movement could result in the appearance of ‘stutter.'”.
Bethesda added that a separate stuttering issue seemingly caused by high framerates on PC will be addressed in the future once they have more information. Despite positive reception overall, many of the game’s negative reviews on Steam included comments about stuttering during gameplay.
While theories about what caused the stuttering ranged from everything including Denuvo DRM to memory write access errors, Digital Foundry’s latest video on the subject first indicated that the problem lied with mouse-based movement.
Deathloop Delivering Excellent Frame-times
In fact, Battaglia shows that Deathloop can deliver excellent frame times — there’s just a mismatch when you’re turning your digital character’s head at non-standard refresh rates, like the ones your variable refresh monitor is designed to provide.
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 to 60 counter-intuitively made everything feel far smoother.
Easy Update of Your Game
As of September 21st, this may now be as easy as updating your game. Originally, you had to right-click on Deathloop in your Steam library, select Properties and then Beta, type juliannashotme into the access code field, hit Check Code, then and Opt into the public beta branch that appears.
Digital Foundry Report
As Digital Foundry tells it, the stuttering was simply a result of the camera movement stopping every 14 frames if playing with a mouse on 120 fps. They say it’s not really your GPU or CPU struggling to produce a high framerate, it’s the camera animation.
If you change your framerate to something like 100 fps, the camera actually increases its speed for one frame, adding an unintended (if slight) extra bit of distance to your mouse movement. Variable refresh rate monitors with G-Sync or FreeSync at unlocked framerates would also appear to stutter.
A less frequent issue Digital Foundry discovered is that when you load up a new map, every 600 frames may be a redundant frame, causing an actual stutter. It appears that a simple reboot of the game or loading a new map may fix the issue.
I don’t think there had been much trouble with stuttering issues in Deathloop up until now, and after a brief test in the new patch, the game seems to be running as well as it was before. Well what do I know, you check for more details here.
