People Can Fly's new looter shooter Outriders was off to a bumpy start but things have picked up very well for the game. The game certainly has a satisfying feel to t and it also does a great job of keeping you at the edge of your seat, especially when hordes of enemies start raging towards you.
As we said in our Outriders review, it's an entertaining and fun shooter that's definitely worth checking out. And from a performance point of view on PC, I found it to be a smooth sail and things have been better than ever now that the initial set of bugs and kinks have been ironed out.
I spent a lot of time with the game and I was able to grab the PC version of the game which I ended up running on a laptop that's powered by Nvidia's RTX 3080 GPU. To my surprise, the game was constantly hitting the 60FPS mark even on max settings.
Nvidia's DLSS, for those of you who don't know, is all about boosting the performance of your games. It a clever AI-based upscaling that helps improve the game's performance on Nvidia's current RTX cards. We have already seen DLSS tech give a significant performance boost for machines using the RTX cards for Death Stranding.
All RTX cards should be able to handle Outriders at 60FPS on max settings even at 2K resolution. If you happen to have the newer RTX 3060 series cards, then you will in fact be able to run the game at 4K resolution with max settings as long as the DLSS setting is set to 'Performance' mode.
Outriders will allow you to choose between four DLSS options – Performance, Ultra Performance, Balanced, and Quality. Performance and Ultra performance mode, as the name suggests, will prioritize frame rates over visual fidelity. Do make a note that the game quality will take a hit in these cases to a point where it might actually be noticeable. In some cases, the DLSS is said to make the game looks sharp and better when the DLSS setting is set to 'Quality'.
I personally ran the game on an RTX 3080-based machine. The graphics settings were set to give me the best visual fidelity and I was constantly hitting the 60FPS mark without taking any significant hit to the performance even at 4K resolution. That's quite an impressive performance and it shows how good the DLSS is for gamers who are out there trying to run these newer titles at high settings.
Yes, the newer RTX 30-series can handle the game very well even without DLSS. However, DLSS will make the gameplay experience that much better by allowing it to constantly hit that 60FPS mark. It's particularly handy during those sweaty gunfights when your screen is overwhelmed with enemies and spectacular ability effects.