It’s a new day, and another badly-optimized AAA Unreal Engine 5 game has hit store shelves. A couple of YouTubers, including Daniel Owen, have discovered serious performance problems in The Outer Worlds 2 that almost mirror Borderlands 4’s atrocious launch day performance. One of the most problematic graphics settings is the game’s ray tracing mode, which prevents even AMD’s Ryzen 7 9800X3D gaming champ from achieving 60 FPS at resolutions well under 1080p.
The aforementioned YouTuber ran the game across three hardware configurations: one with a Ryzen 5 5600X and a GTX 1070, another with the same chip and an RTX 3080 12GB, and the third with a Ryzen 7 9800X3D paired with an RTX 5090. The two former configurations represent the game’s minimum and recommended system requirements on the game’s Steam page.
Bring a BIG CPU!!! The Outer Worlds 2 PC Performance Tested – YouTube
Watch On
The game struggled to hit 60 FPS on both 5600X-powered configurations. With the GTX 1070, the game was unable to run at even 30 FPS consistently in one of the game’s city areas at low settings with FSR set to performance mode at 1080p (540p internal resolution).
You may like
Switching to the RTX 3080 12GB technically fared much better, with that GPU achieving almost 60 FPS with the same settings. But regardless, it couldn’t maintain a solid 60 FPS at the game’s lowest quality settings.
The only configuration of the three that could provide solid performance in the game (at any graphics setting) was the Ryzen 7 9800X3D rig powered by Nvidia’s flagship RTX 5090. With these top-of-the-line components, the game ran above 60 FPS at 4k resolution with DLSS set to performance mode (1080p internal resolution) at the game’s maximum settings (except for hardware ray tracing).
That said, native 4K resolution and hardware ray tracing proved extremely challenging for the 9800X3D and 5090 to handle. Running the game at native 4k resolution with DLAA at maximum settings (with ray tracing still disabled) was only good enough for 45-50 FPS.
Enabling ray tracing significantly degraded performance. At 1080p with DLSS performance mode (540p internal resolution), the RTX 5090 and 9800X3D could not achieve a solid 60 FPS.
The Outer Worlds 2’s performance on modern-day hardware is comically bad, even by Unreal Engine 5 standards. The game struggles to play on the lowest settings on the game’s own recommended hardware configuration, and ray tracing is basically unplayable (unless you like 540p gaming on an RTX 5090). The developers seem to have taken a step from Borderlands 4’s playbook, a game that also struggles to maintain 60FPS at its lowest graphical settings on modern mainstream PC hardware.
