I was almost ready to declare Redfall another PC performance disaster, but a last-minute patch might've saved it

pcgamer.com:

I did not enjoy sinking my teeth into Redfall prior to launch day. That's partially just because I didn't gel with its co-op shooter/immersive sim mashup (see our review in progress for more on that), but also: It was running like butt. I'm happy to report that now, at least on mid to high-end hardware, that picture has changed.

Things were looking bleak just a few days ago. On my pretty respectable i5 12600K, RTX 3070 rig, I was averaging in the mid-50s fps as a baseline on 1440p medium, with DLSS performance mode enabled. While grinding through some early missions with fellow PC Gamer editor Tyler Colp, this generally low performance was augmented by everyone's favorite new PC gaming quirk, shader compilation stutters(opens in new tab). Both my CPU and GPU utilization were around 40%, and as a cherry on top all the leaves in this foliage-dense New England town were always flickering and shimmering.

Tyler saw a generally more performant 4K 60 fps on the still-mighty RTX 3080 Ti, but still experienced general visual weirdness and stuttering. Hot on the heels of two rough PC ports(opens in new tab) in The Last of Us(opens in new tab) and Jedi: Survivor(opens in new tab), I thought it was curtains for Redfall. «Here we go again,» I said aloud, to my cat. «Reddit's gonna crucify this game, and Digital Foundry's gonna deliver the eulogy.»

When I sat down today to reconfirm my findings, however, Steam started downloading a massive 70 GB update for Redfall before I could do anything. After a long wait, the game's now in a much more acceptable state. At 1440p with a mix of high and medium settings on the DLSS quality setting, I was comfortably in the 80s-90s fps tooling around the open world and getting into firefights. I found