Lords of the Fallen’s Steam reviews improve as performance patch lands, devs advise players not to use graphics settings “their rigs cannot handle”

rockpapershotgun.com:

Lords Of The Fallen has issued a major performance patch for the technically troubled Soulslike, helping its Steam reviews to escape their early ‘Mostly Negative’ rating as developers Hexworks resolve a number of the biggest problems on PC.

The 1.1.191 patch released earlier today looked to address what Hexworks outlined as four main issues causing Lords of the Fallen to crash - one of the biggest factors that led to an outpouring of disappointed reviews from players on its release day.

One of the biggest problems is a simple one, and not entirely Hexworks’ fault: players simply haven’t updated their graphics card drivers to work with Lords of the Fallen’s use of the latest Unreal Engine 5.

“We've observed that the majority of crashes result from outdated drivers,” Hexworks wrote in their Steam blog.

To give players a helpful reminder, the devs have now added a pop-up that will check for the latest Nvidia or AMD driver and point them in the right direction to download an update if they need it.

Other graphics card issues leading to crashes include trouble with frame generation stability, which has been temporarily deactivated until it can often a more reliable experience on 40-series Nvidia GPUs, which combined with errors affecting “certain 30 and 40 series GPUs” that resulted in crashes even when the game was set to auto-detect graphics quality.

This was made worse by a number of players apparently trying to push their PCs' hardware past its limits, rather than relying on the game’s automatic detection of the best settings (which, post-patch, should now work without any crashing).

“We've also observed that quite a few players enable settings that their rigs cannot handle, especially in terms of VRAM,”