It’s a new day, and another badly-optimized AAA Unreal Engine 5 game has hit store shelves. A couple of YouTubers, including Daniel Owen, have discovered serious performance problems in The Outer Worlds 2 that almost mirror Borderlands 4’s atrocious launch day performance. One of the most problematic graphics settings is the game’s ray tracing mode, which prevents even AMD’s Ryzen 7 9800X3D gaming champ from achieving 60 FPS at resolutions well under 1080p.
Did the editor not watch the video the entire article is based on? It does >70 in at 4k with DLSS Quality (so 1800p native).
Not to say the game doesn’t have bad issues. Hardware RT is broken (that’s what prompted the performance drop on Daniel Owen’s video. Digital Foundry measured only a 6% drop with it on when not CPU limited, but the RT Shadows are shimmery af and makes it actually look worse than regular Lumen) there’s the usual shader compilation woes and a lot of the higher settings have a lot of cost for very little gain; but the article is clickbait bullshit.
The title specifies “with raytracing” so even if it only performs this badly with ray tracing enabled, then its technically correct.
Software Lumen is raytracing.
Hardware RT did not have nearly that much of an impact when DF tested it, nor does it usually have such an impact compared to regular Lumen in other games. They even recommended setting it to on in the future if the shadows are fixed. So it’s very likely a bug he, and possibly others, experienced being reported as intended behavior.