Dying Light debuts on PC with a myriad of faults; my fixes

Well, Dying Light is here, and from what I’ve been seeing around the Internet, this game suffers from the usual “meant for console, ported to PC” problems. The first thing I noticed was that in SLI mode I would get a severe performance drop and the screen would flicker like mad. This has since been fixed, it looks like, but SLI is still messing up.

I have the latest drivers, latest GeForce Experience, an i7-4930k at 3.7 ghz, 16 megs of RAM, two nVidia GTX 780Tis SLI-linked. Should be more than enough to run this game, but when I run in SLI mode, no matter what I do to the settings, I get framerate drops from around 70-80 FPS to 20-30 FPS. And I’m not moving very far when it happens; I’m testing it around the initial camp. If I just wander around the camp, the FPS drops. There’s no rhyme or reason to it; it has nothing to do with the action onscreen.

Disabling SLI fixes this, it seems. No FPS drops to speak of. It seems they got rid of the flicker issue but still are having some problems with SLI.

Couple other things to check out — in the Control Panel, under Power Management, choose “Best Performance”, just to be safe. Turn off Motion Blur in the game (I hate it anyway, I frickin’ hate motion blur, you get natural motion blur with your eyes). Make sure you have the latest game profiles in GeForce Experience.

I’ve also heard stories about memory leak problems, where you play for an hour or so and the game degrades terribly after that and you have to restart. Hasn’t happened to me so far, but I’ve been messing with the settings so much I haven’t really put that much actual playtime into the game.

For now, keep SLI off; wait for driver updates from nVidia or further patches for Dying Light (but mostly the nVidia drivers). Also, in GeForce Experience, make sure you have not optimized the game using DSR. DSR is a way to render in a higher resolution and display an optimized version at your native resolution. It essentially forces anti-aliasing. It also has a big impact on framerate in games. If you’re running DSR at 4k and downscaling to 1080p, your computer will still run the game as efficiently as if it was running it in 4k — which is to say, not very well at all.

I hate to say this, being an avid PC gamer, but you might be better off buying this title for a console, specifically PS4. I hear it runs great on it. And, as always, when you port from console to PC you’re going to end up with a few problems. Here’s to hoping they get them fixed, because what little I’ve played of Dying Light I really like.

This entry was posted in computers, reviews, tips and tricks, videogames. Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *