XCOM 2 is easily my favourite game of the year so far. It also has serious performance issues. It’s been two weeks since the game launched, and unfortunately, today’s update does little to alleviate them.
The update was intended to fix crashing problems and “some” performance issues. In the former area, at least, it seems like a pretty big success, stomping the dreaded Chryssalid Cocoon save bug into eggy paste. An early game progress-halting bug involving communications research is also out, as is a bug that would cause the game to crash if you tried to preview a modded voice pack. If your saves were affected by any of these bugs, they should be usable again.
However, if you’ve been suffering from sand-paper un-smooth framerates and things of that nature, bad news: very little has changed. According to the patch notes, “adjustments were made to Texture Streaming to assist with periodic frame spikes”. In my experience, though, XCOM 2‘s framerate is still awfully inconsistent, often shedding ten frames or more like a Faceless dropping the whole “human” act.
My overall framerate, meanwhile, has leaped up by around three or four frames, but that’s not particularly significant in the grand scheme of things. I’m still getting 30 FPS or less most of the time, even though I’m running it on a rig that exceeds recommended spec. It’s especially weird given that the pre-release code I received for my review performed significantly better, usually managing around 50-60 FPS.
Oh, and of course, the load times are still frustratingly lengthy. But hey, at least we’ll always have caps-lock.
Sounds like other players aren’t faring much better:
Fortunately, XCOM 2 developer Firaxis says they’re only just getting started.
“We will continue our patch support over the coming months with additional fixes and performance updates,” they wrote. “It is important to the team that we address the issues below as soon as possible so fans can get back to enjoying the game.”
Godspeed, Central. Godspeed.
Comments
7 responses to “XCOM 2’s Update Doesn’t Fix Its Terrible Performance”
Have to say, review updates are probably more of a necessity nowadays, between this and Street Fighter V the pre-release experience (that would be the REVIEW) will soon exist only to bump up pre-orders at bricks-and-mortar or digital retailers.
I has to cap this to 30FPS as I was getting crashes at anything else – which isn’t too bad for a turn based game but it’s disheartening nonetheless
Good thing its a turn based game.
This is true but when I saw the video attached to one of the articles yesterday, my jaw dropped at how cinematic and stunning it looked when running smooth as butter. I have a decent rig… why doesn’t mine look like that?!
SLI 980 TI x2
1440p/Ultra/Fullscreen is 60fps with drops to about 50 if there’s lots of fire on screen or one or two other scenarios.
2160p/Ultra/Fullscreen performance is around 20fps and playable but painful, if I turn lots down I can almost consistently push 30fps.
If I run 1440p/Ultra in a window on the 2160p of my 2160p+1080p 2-screen desktop I can freely play back 1080p video, or do pretty much anything else, and the 1440p windowed framerate is as stable as if it was fullscreen. This has become my standard play configuration.
Not sure what they got wrong between 1440p and 2160p but it’s bad, I mean sure that’s over 2x the pixels but I definitely have more performance than that available.
Also: When running 1440p/Fullscreen I’ve ALT-TAB’ed to Desktop, returned to game, and it’s decided it’ll run at 2160p fullscreen instead of 1440p… and at >50fps. If only I could do that reliably. Possibly still rendering at 1440p, and getting scaled?
Anti Aliasing and vsync is the only thing that takes a hit on my frames, it takes my frames down to less than half. I can run everything max except for anti aliasing at 80fps (in the menu). If I put anti aliasing on, it drops down to 60fps (in the menu). If I enable vsync, it stays at 30fps and gets to 60fps at random moments. Ingame though, these numbers vary but still, v-sync and AA drop my frames, perhaps others would find their framerates improving by modifying those settings.
I’m noticing a better frame rate after the update. Good sign of things to come.