How to stop The Outer Worlds frame rate dropping so often on PC

The Outer Worlds, Obsidian’s new RPG that’s been receiving rave reviews is finally available for all. But, as PC players have begun to jump into the Halcyon colonies many are experiencing some pretty irritating performance issues.

I’ve experienced these first-hand, as have friends and an increasing number of people hitting places like the Outer Worlds subreddit. In the case of frame rate and all-round jittering, there is at least something you can do that should help improve the problem.

Unfortunately, it means running at a lower frame rate. But, I’ve tested this out and over the course of an hour or so playing across the early missions in and around Edgewater and it does seem to have helped stabilize the frame rate.

Head into the games settings and change each of these:

• Ensure the game is running in fullscreen. By default Outer Worlds seems set to run in windowed fullscreen.
• Limit the frame rate to 60 FPS.

Prior to applying both of these settings I’d been seeing what it appears many others are, frequent stuttering and much dipping of the frame rate. Since there’s no option in between 60 FPS and 120 FPS, 60 FPS seems to have done the trick. You could also enable VSync, but I’ve left it off and everything is fine.

But with the above applied the game now seems pretty stable, even running at Ultra settings. In no situation has the GPU been maxed out, and while I can’t speak for everyone’s issues, in my own case it’s certainly not the hardware that’s running out of headroom.

So, give this a shot and hopefully it helps stabilize things a little. Hopefully Obsidian has some patches on the way to fix the issue properly.

The Outer Worlds is available now on Xbox One, PS4 and PC and is available in Xbox Game Pass for console and PC.