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).

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 2560x1440 all screenshots are at that native resolution to avoid scaling issues.

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.

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

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.

Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.