fDeathloop is an easy candidate for game of the year, but that may depend on what platform you’re playing the game on. PlayStation 5 owners are having a wonderful time with the ’60s-themed time-looping title, while PC users have been left in a lurch, thanks to shoddy performance optimization. However, that doesn’t mean that PC players can’t enjoy the game all the same. With some simple tweaks, any PC player with Deathloop‘s recommended hardware can meet or even exceed the game’s performance on the PS5.
As opposed to consoles, you’ll have a vast number of options for what graphics settings you can change on PC, although some will impact your performance much more than others. For testing, I used my personal computer, which sports a Ryzen 5 3600 CPU running at its stock speeds and a Radeon RX 5700. The latter is exactly what Arkane suggests as the recommended GPU for Deathloop while the former is only slightly better than the Ryzen 7 2700x the developer lists. All the same, I was able to squeeze out some admirable performance from my rig that stacked up to what players were experiencing on the PS5.
How does Deathloop perform?
I’m going to glean over the obvious and let you know that with the recommended specs, Deathloop hit the frame rate cap at its lowest quality presets. However, it’s once the medium preset was hit that there were some frame dips. Without any other changes to the settings, the medium preset for Deathloop ran at around 60 to 80 frames per second. However, after turning on AMD’s Fidelity FX Super Resolution in the game’s settings, a simple upscaling process, there was a boost in the minimum frame rate to at least 70 while out in one of the game’s main areas.
Of course, there’s an elephant in the room whenever you’re discussing Deathloop. The game has issues on PC, and while we never experienced some of the reported drops to single-digit frames per second, we did experience regular hitching in the game caused by spikes in frame time. That isn’t anything that you can do anything about — it’s not due to faulty hardware — but it’s worth noting that the issue varies from person to person and PC to PC. Arkane is currently investigating this issue, although it’s not clear when it will actually be solved.
What are the best settings for Deathloop?
After tooling around with the game’s settings a decent amount, though, it was clear that there are some settings players can lower for a few extra frames here or there, as long as you’re willing to make some compromises.
Turn off motion blur
Admittedly, this first one isn’t a compromise; it’s more that we’re doing you a favor. Motion blur in Deathloop looks pretty ugly, and it uses up a bit more of your GPU’s processing power to boot. Unless you’re running this game at just barely 30 fps and you want to smooth some of that out, leave motion blur off.
Lower water quality
This may seem like a strange setting to lower at first, but once you’ve played Deathloop for around 10 hours and realize just how little of that is spent looking at the water, it makes more sense. Dialing down the game’s water quality settings just a bit, from high to medium, for instance, can lead to a decent improvement in your game’s frame rate if it’s struggling somewhat.
Turn texture quality down
Texture quality is precious to PC gamers, but in this case, it’s not the worst to turn down. Of course, the game looks best when texture quality is above medium, but setting it down that low doesn’t hurt the game’s stylish visuals too much and even gives you a decent boost in frames per second to boot. Just do yourself a favor and don’t look at any of the mountains or vistas far off in the distance once the game’s texture settings are on medium. Mountains end up looking more like melted piles of chocolate ice cream at that point.
Forget about shadow quality
Deathloop‘s implementation of shadow quality is a bit outlandish, only rendering the shadows farther away from you at a higher resolution the more it’s turned up. Even at its lowest settings, the shadows closest to you (aka, the ones you’ll notice the most) are passable in quality. By turning down shadow quality as far as it can go, you’ll see an instant improvement in your FPS.
Deathloop PC requirements
Here are Deathloop‘s various tiers of PC requirements, which everyone should take into account. Naturally, the game will run better if you have an RTX 3080, but if your computer’s parts are worse than what’s listed in the minimum specs, it may not be worth picking the game up at this time.
Similarly, if you really want to match the experience PS5 players are getting with Deathloop, we highly recommend running the game off an NVMe solid-state drive. Ideally, you’ll have one that’s PCIe Gen4, the same standard as what you’ll find in a PS5 or Xbox Series X|S. However, a PCIe Gen3 NVMe SSD will also do just fine compared to a regular old mechanical hard drive.
Deathloop minimum specs
- OS — 64-bit Windows 10 Version 1909 or higher
- CPU — Intel Core i5-8400 and 2.80GHz / AMD Ryzen 5 1600
- Memory — 12GB
- Storage — 30GB (HDD)
- GPU — Nvidia GTX 1060 (6GB) / AMD Radeon RX 580 (8GB)
Deathloop recommended specs
- OS — 64 bit Windows 10 Version 1909 or higher
- CPU — Intel Core i7-9700K @ 3.60GHz / AMd Ryzen 7 2700X
- Memory — 16GB
- Storage — 30GB (SSD)
- GPU — Nvidia RTX 2060 (6GB) / AMD Radeon RX 5700 (8GB)
Deathloop ultra 4K specs
- OS — 64-bit Windows 10 Version 1909 or higher
- CPU — Intel Core i9-10900K at 3.70GHz / AMD Ryzen 7 3800XT
- Memory — 16 GB
- Storage — 30 GB (SSD)
- GPU — Nvidia RTX 3080 (10GB) / AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT (16GB)
