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, you must tweak your settings to play it. Firstly, ensure that your hardware matches the minimum requirements. Then, update your GPU driver to the latest one.
Finally, you can tweak the game settings and make tweaks in the Windows folder to make things work. If done correctly, you will get a performance boost on your PC for Outer Worlds.
1. Update your GPU Drivers
The first and foremost step towards a game’s new release, more like a ritual at this point for everyone, is to update your GPU drivers. This will give you a noticeable performance boost.
Visit your GPU provider’s website and download the latest drivers for your chipset. These drivers are optimized for The Outer Worlds and should help you a bit with optimization.
2. Disable Ambient Occlusion, Depth of Field, and a few other handicaps
Ambient Occlusion is always enabled regardless of High or Low normally. 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. But it should be in the My Documents folder. Alternatively, use the Windows search function to find it.
3. Graphics Quality
You have only six options, 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 differences that each setting provides are mainly the reflections and the lighting. The game on Low doesn’t look that bad at all; it actually looks pretty great.
With those details in mind, we can safely target the settings we need to tone down to get higher frame rates. It’s a tradition to keep Shadows at a reasonably lower setting for higher performance in most games; something similar applies here.
Once you turn Shadows down from their current preset, you will see a roughly 10 to 15 percent increase in performance. 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 impact the game’s performance much, 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 your computer can handle. Doing both of these things gives a slight boost to performance without compromising on quality.
If it’s still not enough, you can 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.
4. Tweaks to perform in Windows
You can perform a few additional changes to improve the performance of your Windows.
- Make sure you have all excessive applications closed.
- Head to task manager, go into the Details Tab, 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 game’s sweet spot and help you enjoy it at gloriously high frame rates. The Outer Worlds is a beautiful game and best experienced with the best and most optimal settings.
