Outriders PC Modern GPU And DLSS Performance Tested

Outriders is the latest title by the team at People Can Fly and has been met with a relatively warm reception by both PC and Xbox gamers offering quite a few familiar shooter tropes and marrying the grind of looter shooters with the intense arena segments with cover mechanics similar to the Gears series. But if you want a review of the game you’ll have to wait for that to be up on the site, in the meantime, we have a bevy of guides ready to go.

But we’re here for performance and performance is what this game delivers on with the latest releases of graphics cards from AMD and NVIDIA. Being the current nature of Unreal Engine 4 with its native DLSS 2.0 integration you can be assured that Outriders is no exception, so we take a quick look at the performance of this title’s performance scaling in presets, DLSS settings, and resolutions (including Ultrawide).

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Outriders Testing Methodology

We Outriders early in the game setting up a custom run from Hanging Tree in the First City through the container field up to the bridge. This run doesn’t include any combat due to the unpredictable nature of such. There’s no built-in benchmark utility so we were left to our own devices to set up this run, so find a different place and you’ll likely find some different numbers but the scaling should stay the same between different card configurations.

Once we had the results from 3 runs, after discarding an initial burner run for loading purposes, we took the average of average frame rates as well as the 1% percentile results from the run. We report our performance metrics as average frames per second and have moved away from the 1% and .1% reporting and are now using the 1% percentile. For those uncertain of what the 1% percentile is, representing is easily explained as showing only 1 frame out of 100 is slower than this frame rate. Put another way, 99% of the frames will achieve at least this frame rate.

Test System

Components X570
CPU Ryzen 9 5900X (stock)
Memory 32GB Hyper X Predator DDR4 3600
Motherboard ASUS TUF Gaming X570 Plus-WiFi
Storage TeamGroup Cardea 1TB NVMe PCIe 4.0
PSU Cooler Master V1200 Platinum
Windows Version Latest verion of windows at the time of testing
Hardware-Accelerated GPU Scheduling On if supported by GPU and driver.
BAR Support SAM is enabled for Radeon, Resizable-BAR is enabled for GeForce

Graphics Cards Tested:

GPU Architecture Core Count Clock Speed Memory Capacity Memory Speed
NVIDIA RTX 3090 FE Ampere 10496 1395/1695 24 GB GDDR6X 19.5Gbps
NVIDIA RTX 3080 FE Ampere 8704 1440/1710 10 GB GDDR6X 19Gbps
NVIDIA RTX 3070 FE Ampere 5888 1500/1730 8 GB GDDR6 14Gbps
NVIDIA RTX 3060 Ti Ampere 4864 1410/1665 8 GB GDDR6 14Gbps
EVGA RTX 3060 XC Black Ampere 3584 1320/1780 12GB GDDR6 15Gbps
AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT RDNA 2 5120 2015/2250 16 GB GDDR6 16Gbps
AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT RDNA 2 4608 2015/2250 16 GB GDDR6 16Gbps
AMD Radeon RX 6800 RDNA 2 3840 1815/2105 16 GB GDDR6 16Gbps
AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT RDNA2 2560 2424/2581 12GB GDDR6 16Gbps

Drivers Used

Drivers  
Radeon Settings 21.4.1
GeForce 466.11

Outriders Preset Scaling At 4K

Testing presets at 4K gives us a couple of quick metrics before diving into the game too deeply.  First off, it shows us how the game looks at various presets as well as how performance scales with those settings. And if there is anything this engine and setup do is scale. Moving from ULTRA to HIGH nets you a massive performance increase with minimal differences in most situations, I recommend going for it personally. Moving down to MEDIUM is only recommended if you can’t notice but going to LOW is not a recommendation I can put on the table, shoot for resolution scale reduction first.

*Note* due to a resizing limitation of 2560×1440 all screenshots are at that native resolution to avoid scaling issues.

ULTRA PRESET

HIGH PRESET

MEDIUM PRESET

LOW PRESET

Outriders DLSS Scaling At 4K

Testing presets at 4K gives us a couple of quick metrics before diving into the game too deeply.  First off, it shows us how the game looks at various presets as well as how performance scales with those settings. The usual settings are here but as always I recommend sticking to QUALITY for a mostly improved visual experience, Balanced or lower at your own risk. Balanced is going to give you a better performance boost but I would recommend going with a mixture of HIGH preset with Quality DLSS for the best crossroads of performance and visuals.

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Moving  below BALANCED (check the screenshots) starts to degrade rendered objects in the distance like the power lines and turrets in the distance.

DLSS OFF

DLSS QUALITY

DLSS BALANCED

DLSS PERFORMANCE

DLSS Ultra Performance

Outriders Graphics Card Results

*DLSS settings below are all using the QUALITY preset as recommended above

1080p

Ultrawide 1080p

1440p

Ultrawide 1440p

UHD 4K

Conclusion

Outriders is a game whose pace is fast, it’s frantic, and it rarely slows down. This is the kind of game that benefits greatly from high framerates and thankfully no matter how hard you want to go at this one, or which side of the graphics vendor fence you’re then you’re going to find a fast and fancy time to be had.

There is a BUT here, and it’s a pretty big one just like with Cyberpunk 2077, DLSS. NVIDIA’s Deep Learning Super Sampling proves itself to be a killer feature for this one. If you’re at 1080p with an RTX 30 Series card then you’re not gonna get much use out of it unless you’re on the RTX 3060, but when you move to 1440p you get a substantial boost, putting most cards running up against a tier higher than they’re classed.

Either way, you’re in for a good time with your favorite Altered character within the world of Outriders. On a more positive note with the latest patch, the intermittent stuttering that I was experiencing on both vendor’s cards as you load into the game is largely gone, so I can only expect things to go up from here.



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