Heard reports that the Outer Worlds: Spacer's Choice Edition's PC's latest patch (1.3) had improved things substantially since launch, which had massive GPU demands for one, but the worst aspect was the horrific shader stutter. So plunked down for the upgrade price and gave it a shot on my system (32GB, 3060, i5-12400f).
I only played for an hour last night so this isn't an exhaustive look, but happy to report at least in my short experience, it's night and day since release. First impressions aren't the best at launch, since they made the UX mistake of
not communicating to the user what you're doing - there's a black screen with a 'press button/key' prompt, but nothing registers. The reason is it's churning away at shaders in the background, great! But you gotta just pop up a little bubble about "Compiling Shaders", I thought it had crashed since my CPU was basically locked doing the compiling and not registering my button presses. Still, around just a one minute wait, the process is at least well multi-threaded.
But what a difference that 1 minute makes. At release,
every action you took would produce a shader stutter. Look in this direction - stutter. Fire your gun, stutter. Explosion? Stutter. That's all gone now. Again after only an hour I can't guarantee their compiling step is fully comprehensive, but the only frame drops I had were due to obvious GPU demands. Ultra at everything can be more taxing than the original game due to the new lighting, but it also scales well. I play with Ultra textures at a mixture of medium/high settings, 4k with FSR Performance and get a
mostly locked 60. Cards like a 3070 should be able to to Ultra 4k with FSR Quality for 60+ fps I reckon.
There's the frustrating lack of DLSS, FSR2 only which does a...'decent' job, but DLSS of course would be appreciated. There's of course still some odd artistic choices like wildly oversaturated colours at points, but the better textures and lighting in other scenes are definitely noticeable. So it may still not be to everyone's tastes, but at least on a framerate consistency basis - again, the caveat being this was a short run - this is a huge improvement, and more stable than even the original now.
As for the console versions,
here's a video of the PS5 version with Patch 1.3. Definitely some improvements, a good chunk of it can be in your VRR window now it seems, but considering how well the game scales on my system it's strange, there should be plenty of opportunity to just lower the res/settings further and get a solid 60. So less impressive on the console front atm.
www.digitaltrends.com
