Outriders in the technology test – ComputerBase : Test |CUP | Specs |Config

With Outriders, People Can Fly landed a surprise success. ComputerBase analyzes the technology of the PC version with Unreal Engine 4. As usual, the focus is on GPU benchmarks, the comparison of DirectX 11 with DirectX 12 and the assessment of Nvidia DLSS. In this case, it was worth it to be later.

With Outriders, People Can Fly and publisher Square Enix have developed a surprise success. Outriders relies on an open game world, but unlike many comparable representatives, it is not a service game and for that reason alone is a rarity.

With Unreal Engine 4, DirectX 12 and DLSS

Outriders is not a graphic masterpiece, which is not surprising given the medium-sized development team. Nevertheless, the game offers something for the eye and relies on different biomes, great visibility, many particle effects and numerous explosions. Especially in terms of character representation and animations you can see the lack of budget in the title – it cannot keep up with AAA heavy calibers.

The developers implemented the game with Unreal Engine 4. It uses the DirectX 12 renderer by default, but DirectX 11 is still available as an option. As a further specialty, Outriders can handle DLSS 2.0 (test), which is supposed to offer better performance on GeForce RTX graphics cards with comparable image quality.

The technology matured with the patches

ComputerBase has created extensive graphics card benchmarks with Outriders, compares the two APIs and takes a look at the implementation of DLSS. In the weeks that the game has been available, numerous patches have already been released. And the PC version also needed that, because technically Outriders was not in good condition at the start. Even now there are still problems, but significantly fewer and significantly less annoying.

In the beginning, the technology is nerve-wracking

When the editorial team was using Outriders for the first time, there were numerous technical problems, even though a patch had already been installed at the time. The editorial team did not have really serious errors such as lost equipment, but they did have minor, annoying problems. Outriders got stuck at 60 FPS after every cutscene – and there are a lot of them. The only way to fix this was to change the screen mode (from full screen to window and back again).

With activated DLSS it happened again and again that you could not get to the desired location during a fast trip, but instead the game crashed. Strangely enough, this only happened with certain goals, but then stubbornly there, while others worked without any problems. With the DLSS switched off, the high-speed trip ran flawlessly. The two bugs have disappeared with the last patches.

A construction site is still open for DirectX 12

But one thing has stayed the same: DirectX 12 still struggles with annoying stuttering when entering a new region. Apparently there are problems with shader caching there. Further details can be found in the section DirectX 11 versus DirectX 12.

Outriders offers a very simple graphics menu on the PC, but does not do without any luxury. For example, in-game down- and up-sampling is possible, which can be freely set in 1 percent steps between 50 and 200 percent. In addition, there is an FPS limiter that can be configured in 1-FPS steps between 30 and 244 FPS, and a separate limiter for the cutscenes that allows 30, 60, 90 and 120 FPS. Unlike the general FPS limiter, this cannot be deactivated.

In addition, the game offers four different graphics presets with “Low”, “Medium”, “High” and “Ultra”, whereby the latter also represents the maximum graphic details. What is completely missing, however, are sample screenshots of the individual options or at least descriptions of the graphic details.

DX 12 has a massive advantage over DX 11, but not optimal

If you start Outriders directly via Steam, you have the option of using DirectX 11 instead of DirectX 12. If you instead create and use a manual link, for example, you do not have this choice.

DirectX 12 is massively faster than DirectX 11 in Outriders. Unfortunately, the editors’ benchmarks do not fully show the extent. Because the test scene used by ComputerBase intentionally loads the GPU heavily. Even then, the low-level API is ahead of the old interface, but not nearly as much as in scenes that place more demands on the processor – the camps that have been opened are one of them, for example.

In 1,920 × 1,080, at least the approach shows where the journey is headed: DirectX 12 on the GeForce RTX 3080 delivers only 5 percent more average FPS than DirectX 11, but 22 percent better percentile FPS. And with the Radeon RX 6800 XT, the advantage is even 3 or 27 percent. And that is just the beginning. In other sequences even a plus of 50 percent and even greater advantages have been shown. In contrast, 3840 × 2160 is within the absolute GPU limit in the test scene. DirectX 12 shows only minor advantages here, if at all.

DirectX 12 has a catch

DirectX 12 improves the performance significantly, but has a disturbing problem: The shader caching obviously only works very poorly, so that the game always jerks for several seconds when new shader code is compiled in the background. And that happens quite often: it happens again every few minutes or after a major fight. Then Outriders hooks noticeably for several seconds. The numerous game patches have not changed anything up to now.

No matter how annoying this is, DirectX 12 should still be used because the speed is much better apart from the jerking. And because there is only a problem in areas where normally there is no fighting. That is the lesser of two evils. On the other hand, if you want to have it consistently smooth, you should play with DirectX 11, but then lose a lot of speed in some cases.

On the next page: Benchmarks (FHD, WQHD & UHD), frame times and VRAM allocation