The Lord of the Rings: Gollum Doesn’t Look That Good or Run That Well, Even with DLSS 3 and RTX

wccftech.com:

Over three years after the original announcement, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is finally available on PC and consoles. You can read Wccftech's review on this page; I'll focus on the PC performance here.

Ever since Daedalic Entertainment released the official system requirements, gamers have been worried since they are some of the highest we've seen to date.

Unfortunately, after testing the review build of The Lord of the Rings: Gollum with the optimized Game Ready driver released by NVIDIA, I'd say at least most of those concerns were warranted.

First things first, though. The game is powered by Unreal Engine 4 and, unfortunately, it does have quite a bit of stuttering, mostly due to traversal (induced by movement between chunks of the locations), though I wouldn't be surprised if there was some shader stuttering as well. After all, the game does not explicitly mention performing any shader caching.

It's not the worst stuttering encountered in an Unreal Engine game (or in any game, for that matter), but it's there even when using DLSS 3 (Frame Generation).

In fact, while NVIDIA touted a nearly 4x performance uplift with DLSS technologies, most of that is probably due to DLSS 2 (Super Resolution). In my testing with an RTX 4090 GPU and i7-12700KF CPU, DLSS 3 only provided a 41% boost (from 82 to 116.1 frames per second) in average FPS, with 1% percentile and 0.2% percentile results registering similar boosts (42% and 43%, respectively) once Frame Generation was enabled.

It's far from the biggest performance uplift I've seen with DLSS 3. Of course, if you own a GeForce RTX 40 graphics card, you'll still want to activate it in The Lord of the Rings: Gollum to essentially get extra frame rate for free.

There doesn't seem to be