The Outer Worlds PC Performance Guide

Check out this PC Performance guide for The Outer Worlds to squeeze out ounce of boost possible from your PC to improve frames

The Outer Worlds, the RPG by Obsidian Entertainment, has been a well-received game apart from the ample criticism over the lack of options in Video Settings. The Outer Worlds should run fine should you be lucky enough to own a higher-end PC, but if you are a little behind on your PC upgrade, then by following this PC performance guide you should be able to get the most out of your experience.

The Outer Worlds PC Performance

To start things off, let’s talk about the minimum and recommended specs for The Outer Worlds, aimed to run the game at a 60FPS

Minimum Specs

  • OS: Windows 7 (SP1) 64-bit
  • CPU: Intel Core i3-3225 or AMD Phenom II X6 1100T
  • RAM: 4GB
  • GPU: Nvidia GTX 650 Ti or AMD HD 7850
  • Storage: 40GB

Recommended Specs

  • OS: Windows 10 64-bit
  • CPU: Intel Core i7-7700K or Ryzen 5 1600
  • RAM: 8GB
  • GPU: GeForce GTX 1060 6GB or Radeon RX 470
  • Storage: 40GB

Update your GPU Drivers
The first and foremost step towards the new release of a game, more like a ritual at this point for everyone; is to update your GPU drivers. This will give you a noticeable amount of performance boost.

The current latest Nvidia driver is 440.97 while that of AMD is 19.10.2 These drivers are optimized for The Outer Worlds and should help you a bit on the optimization end.

Disable Ambient Occlusion, Depth of Field and a few other handicaps

Ambient Occlusion is always enabled regardless of High or Low, so it is recommended that you disable it along with Depth of Field by going into the Engine.ini file, the location of this file will vary according to your game DRM. A detailed guide on disabling both of these things can be found here.

Graphics Quality
In terms of options, you have only six, which makes our options to tweak the game from within extremely limited. There are five presets to choose from, which would naturally be: Low, Medium, High, Very High and Ultra.

The main difference that each setting provides is mainly the reflections and the lighting, the game on Low doesn’t look that bad at all, actually looks pretty great.

With those details in mind, we can safely target the settings that we need to tone down in order to get higher frame rates. It’s kind of a tradition to keep Shadows at a reasonably lower setting for higher performance in most games, something similar applies here.

You will see a roughly 10 to 15 percent increase in performance once you turn Shadows down from their current preset. It’s recommended that if your PC can’t handle it, just turn them down to either Medium or Low and you’ll notice a significant boost in performance.

Visual Effects, such as Chromatic Aberration and blood effects, light flares or explosions don’t have that much of an impact on the performance of the game, but you can disable them for that little extra boost in frame rates. But keeping them on is vital to enjoying the game’s attention to detail.

Turn on VSync and cap your frame-rates to what you think your computer can handle. Doing both of these things give a little bit of boost to performance without compromising on any quality whatsoever.

If it’s still not enough, you can go ahead and adjust the 3D Resolution setting, which should be below the Resolution options in the Graphics tab. Lowering the percentage renders the game at a lower resolution, so if you’re playing at 1080p and 100%, try lowering it a little to see what suits you best.

Tweaks to perform in Windows
You can perform a few additional changes in order to improve performance from your Windows.

  • Make sure you have all excessive applications closed.
  • Head to task manager, go into the Details Tab and right-click the IndianaEpicGameStore-Win64-Shipping.exe application and set the priority to High. This will prevent any stuttering.
  • If you have an SSD, move the game there for a smoother experience as an HDD’s slow Read and Write might affect the game a bit.
  • Press Win+R, type in %temp% and delete everything in the Temp folder.
  • Type temp only in the command prompt now and again delete everything.
  • Type prefetch in the command prompt and again delete everything.

Changing all of these settings should get you to the sweet spot of the game and help you enjoy it in gloriously high frame-rates. The Outer Worlds is a beautiful game and best experienced with the best and most optimal settings

Avatar photo

Ali is a passionate RPG gamer. He believes that western RPGs still have a lot to learn from JRPGs. He is editor-in-chief at SegmentNext.com but that doesn't stop him from writing about his favorite video ...