It’s a new day, and another badly-optimized AAA Unreal Engine 5 game has hit store shelves. A couple of YouTubers, including Daniel Owen, have discovered serious performance problems in The Outer Worlds 2 that almost mirror Borderlands 4’s atrocious launch day performance. One of the most problematic graphics settings is the game’s ray tracing mode, which prevents even AMD’s Ryzen 7 9800X3D gaming champ from achieving 60 FPS at resolutions well under 1080p.


As someone playing this on a 3080 with no major issues, just turn off ray tracing. The game really isn’t that bad once you turn it off.
Does raytracing even make the game look noticeably cooler, anyway?
It’s quite crazy how much performance you gain from using pre-calculated lighting instead of raytracing. I know it looks worse, but there’s gotta be a way to find a happy middle ground, maybe a “raytracing lite” lol.
I find raytracing adds very little to the look of the vast majority of games unless they are slow enough to focus on shadows or fine details.
Maybe I’m not playing the games that benefit significantly from raytracing.