How to fix FPS drops/stuttering in Outriders

Outriders officially launched today after spending four years in development. While fans were justifiably excited, the game had some major problems on day one. 

Aside from the troublesome server issues, which are bound to happen with any online game, players who actually got to play Outriders were experiencing some difficulties. This problem is seemingly limited to PC players only and it deals with stuttering and FPS drops. 

No matter what hardware the player has in their PC, stuttering and random drops in FPS are inevitable. This more so happens in congested areas or during fights, which makes the problem even more noticeable. The stuttering only occurs for a second or two, in which the FPS drops, and then returns to normal. 

• Read more: Outriders: How to remove FPS cap after cutscenes

As soon as this problem was reported to the Outriders subreddit and other social media, the developers came up with a few workarounds to solve the matter, which you can see below. 

Fixing the stuttering in Outriders

The developers laid out the workarounds in a Steam discussion, which can be seen through their Twitter or down below.

Potential Workaround:

• Select the "Play Outriders- DirectX11" launch option when starting the game.
• Alternatively, force DX11 to run the game via a command line
• In Steam : Outriders Demo -> Manage -> Properties -> Launch option-> Write the below in the textbox without the " "
• "-force -dx11"

The first workaround deals with launching the game in DX11 rather than DX12. However, the listed workaround above doesn’t seem to work, as the game still launches in DX12 no matter what the player changes in the properties, as reported by many players who attempted the fix. 

Moving on, the developers also listed some smaller changes that could help the stuttering problem. 

Alternative Workarounds:

• Disable Ansel
• Disable DLSS
• Turn Vsync off
• Enable your FPS Limiter and choose various limits to see if improvements are made
• Ensure Controller Configuration is supported

These workarounds are hit and miss for most players, as some are reporting the issue is fixed but others get the same FPS drops. 

The final fix the developers offered was rolling back the latest Nvidia driver, which was designed to help optimize Outriders. Players can do this through GeForce Experience if they haven’t already downloaded the driver. 

Although, even that didn’t fix the problem for some players. What does seem to work, however, is going into Offline mode in Steam or simply turning off the friend network. Weirdly enough, this worked for us here at GINX and stopped most of the random stuttering.

• Read more: Outriders: How to boost FPS and performance

You can go into Offline mode by clicking on the “Steam” tab in the top left of the application and hitting “Go Offline.” 

How to go into Offline mode on Steam. (Picture: Valve)

Those appear to be the only workable fixes for the stuttering in Outriders at the moment. If any additional fixes arise, we’ll be sure to let you know.