I never liked sinking my teeth into Redfall before its release date. That’s partly because I’m new to co-op shooter/immersive sim mashups (see my ongoing review for more). I’m happy to report that that situation has changed, at least for mid- to high-end hardware.
Just a few days ago things looked bleak. On my pretty respectable i5 12600K, RTX 3070 rig, with DLSS performance mode enabled, as a baseline for 1440p media he averaged an fps in the mid-50s. While working on a few early missions with fellow his PC gamer editor Tyler Colp, this generally poor performance is everyone’s favorite new PC game quirk: shaders stutter in his compilation. enhanced by (opens in new tab)My CPU and GPU utilization were both around 40%. What’s more, in this leafy New England town, every foliage was always flickering and shimmering.
Tyler confirmed an overall improvement in 4K 60 fps performance on the still-powerful RTX 3080 Ti, but he still experienced overall visual oddities and stuttering. followed by two rough PC ports (opens in new tab) in the last of us (opens in new tab) and Jedi: Survivor (opens in new tab), I thought it was a Redfall curtain. “I’ll be back,” I said aloud to the cat. “Reddit criticizes the game, Digital Foundry praises it.”
However, when I sat down to review my findings today, Steam started downloading Redfall’s massive 70 GB update. After a long wait, the game has become more acceptable. When combined with high and medium settings for DLSS quality settings at 1440p, I comfortably tooled open worlds and engaged in firefights at his 80’s to his 90’s fps. Shader compilation is still choppy, but I found that the shimmering foliage coped pretty well with a higher level of detail settings, and Tyler had pretty much the same experience. The stuttering is still present, but less debilitating, and the foliage shimmer has been fixed by raising his LoD.
If you’ve seen Redfall gameplay leaks early on on launch day, that’s not necessarily the full story.My mid-range’s relatively modern setup currently has perfectly decent performance with this day one patch. Whether it’s worth closing the hood and playing the game is left to our full review, but if you’re hoping for a new Arkane classic, we suggest you keep your hopes up. Being candid in our ongoing review (opens in new tab): “Forty hours in Redfall hope the vampire wins.”
If you play Redfall, let us know how it performed in the comments. So far I have only been able to test with Nvidia GPUs.
