Topic: Really baffled with Avoweds performance and how simple it was to fix

Just recently started playing Avowed even though it released early 2025. Was initially not impressed with the performance and every time i started playing a new session, after a few minutes playing there would be a 10 to 20 second lag spike, followed by a stuttery mess that slowly dissappeared after a few more minutes playing.

My system is usually more than good enough for max settings at 1440p with DLLS set to quality at 60 fps, tho i like to cap framerate to 60 or 120, due to wanting to be conservative on my electric bill and GPU temps. 12700k, 32gb 5600mhz DDR 5, 4080 RTX and an Asus 27 inch 240 Hz Oled.

What fixed the stutter and lag spike? Adding a single line in the engine,ini ->
[SystemSettings]
D3D12.PSO.DriverOptimizedDiskCache=1

How on earth can companies mess these things up? Did the developer seriously forget to turn loading precompiled shaders from the hard drive? How?!?

Not bought Outer Worlds 2, but reading about shaders being missed in the precompilaion step, so waiting for a few patches. Am wondering if above fix would also improve the performance of Outer Worlds as well.

We are like 20 years into big developers making consoles their first-class development targets. If the game hits all its performance metrics on console targets, who cares about the PC player? PC players for decades have proven they are willing to spend their own time & energy finding fixes & workarounds like this. "The community will fix it." It's a joke.

Did you buy Avowed? Is it too late to return it? Then they have your money. Will you stop buying Obsidian games over it? Will you stop buying Xbox Game Studios games over it?

Did you play it through PC Game Pass? Will you cancel your subscription over it?

It's exhausting.

Thank you. I had the same problem on similar hardware (13700k/4080). But I just recently finished the game and will probably not play it again. But whenever I loaded in a session, frame rates where super bad the first minute or so and then very inconsistent framerate with constant 20% drops. I usually just let the game sit for a few minutes. After about 4 minutes or so it stabilized and then the game would run absolutely fine for the rest of the session. I don't have it installed anymore, otherwise I would try and reconfirm your fix.

Yea, was the exact issue i had. I dont bother with mods and downloading community placebo fixes, but was surprised that this issue was fixed with adding a single line... So much for game developers and the struggle against shader compilation stutter.

Curious about Outer Worlds 2 and the similar issues it has/had with shader compilation missing precompiling important shaders... saw Alexs video about the early cutscenes missing important shaders.. i mean, when will it end, cough

@Synchrotone I am playing the Outer Worlds 2 right now. I runs very smooth for me. Haven't noticed anything like that issue in Avowed. Overall, I think The Outer Worlds 2 runs better than Avowed.

Allright, thats probably going to be my next game to play when i finish Clair Obscure 33.

But does it still have missing shaders when you run it the first time? And i guess they prolly havent fixed the bugged hardware lumen yet and the shadow bug?

@Synchrotone By now the separated RT Shadows and Global Illumination. I play with RT Global Illumination ON and RT Shadows OFF. I don't know if the RT shadows are fixed. But at least it's not just on RT toggle anymore.

Allright, that is at least something if the RT shadows are still bugged. I thought that the whole raytracing was Lumen based though and didnt know that had separate shadows and gi toggles.