Lords of the Fallen’s PC port isn’t perfect even on my beefy gaming PC

We’ve been playing Lords of the Fallen on PC for a little while now, and it’s not exactly a stellar experience, even on my powerful gaming PC.

Lords of the Fallen is a technically complex, cutting-edge AAA title, with a development team working on a brand-new engine, Unreal Engine 5, for the first time. The result is a less-than-perfect experience. Firstly, we have to give credit to developer Hexworks. Several issues were patched over the pre-release period that we had access to the game, such as errant crashes, and performance degrading as you unlock more areas.

Trying the V1.1.80 version of the game on PC still results in some issues for the title. Vsync modes still struggle to be toggled on or off, and I couldn’t lower the resolution of the title while playing on Steam Deck.

But, there’s something deeper going on here, too. In our time with the title, I could see clear rendering issues. My PC uses an AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D, in addition to an Nvidia RTX 4080, which by all rights should run the game flawlessly on my 144Hz gaming monitor. This was not the case, even though I could run the game at blisteringly fast framerates.

Even my $2500 gaming PC ran into issues

CI GAMES

One particular problem on V1.1.80 of the title included an odd issue where we were unable to turn Vsync on. “No problem!” I thought to myself, considering the capabilities of the VRR gaming monitor I was playing on. Unfortunately, we ran into one big immersion-breaking problem.

The game has a shimmering artifact that almost looks like tearing, which immediately breaks immersion in the finely crafted world. This odd shimmer was visible no matter what settings I had turned off or on.

Defiantly, I locked the framerate in the game to 144 FPS, and enabled DLSS to ensure that it would always hit the target framerate, and the artifact was still visible on my display, and could even be captured on video.

This issue gets exacerbated when playing at lower or higher framerates, and with no way to turn Vsync back on, it’s unclear whether this was related to the issue or not, and could be tied to other technical problems.

Even when running the game using DLSS 3’s frame generation features, and every bell and whistle possible to spin the game up to around 200 FPS, these strange rendering artifacts were still visible. The game does run well on modern hardware, but it’s clear that some technical elements have been left by the wayside.

Lords of the Fallen demands fast components

Dexerto

Lords of the Fallen’s system requirements specify that you might need 45GB of available storage, and even says that you might need an SSD. However, even with an SSD, one of our fellow Dexerto colleagues found that the game would repeatedly show warnings that their drive was too slow. We ran the offending drive through CrystalDiskMark, a benchmark that showcases how fast your PC’s storage can be, and achieved the following result.

• Peak read speed: 2610 MB/s
• Peak write speed: 1472 MB/s

So, going by Lords of the Fallen’s system requirements, this speed of access should be more than adequate to run the game on PC, which proved to not be the case. It’s here that I suspect that the game will actually require speeds of around 3500MB/s or higher. To put that into a more plain term, you have to have a fast PCIe 3.0 drive, or PCIe 4.0 drive, the latter of which is the standard for modern consoles.

Interestingly, we had no such error pop up on the Steam Deck, which runs an SSD similar in speed to the gaming laptop my colleague was using.

Given how Lords of the Fallen allows you to rapidly shift between different “worlds” at the click of a button, it could be more SSD-dependent than its developers originally thought.

Unreal Engine 5 growing pains could be responsible

CI GAMES

Lords of the Fallen is the second high-profile example of a modern game launched on consoles and PC which has some technical issues. Immortals of Aveum was the first title, which was released earlier this year.

While the title is still playable on PC, Steam Deck, and lower-end hardware, there is a litany of technical problems that hamper the overall experience. Firstly, companies need to tackle technical hurdles before releasing a product to the market, something that’s likely in the control of publishers, rather than the game developers themselves.

Additionally, PC system requirements need to be better across the board. While Lords of the Fallen does use cutting-edge features, not all SSDs are the same. If a relatively modern PC runs into issues, then the marketing teams, publishers, and developers need to be transparent and upfront about the technical demands of the title.

These issues might ease over time

As with every new engine, or leap in technological performance, it’s going to take a while for developers worldwide to understand, use, and release a game running on the platform. Fortnite’s Unreal Engine 5 implementation is absolutely excellent, but not all game developers have the privilege of also being the creator of the engine itself.

Until then, just be aware that Lords of the Fallen on PC doesn’t offer the smoothest experience, no matter what hardware you might be running.