Played at the crack of dawn for about an hour and got to the end of the prologue.Lots of people complaining about shader stuttering on Steam. Come on mrk, you're up. Be the guinea pig and let me know if they're right
Yeah there are some shader stutters and traversal stutters though worth noting the game does not do any shader pre-comp at the start on first run so this will be why, though they are far fewer than what say Silent Hill 2 remake launched with. I was able to ignore them for the most part.
What is interesting (both good and bad) is that performance is mostly excellent. I can play native 4K (DLAA) and get well over 60fps, or lock the game to 60fps with all GFX whacked up on a 4090.
DLSS 4.5 Quality yields 130~ fps and I can lock the game to whatever I please here. Game feels smooth at 60fps native locked, whilst DLSS upscaled looks amazing anyway.
Resource use at 4K DLAA is:
VRAM use is up to 1GB more with DLAA vs DLSS Quality.
You can see locked at 60fps with DLAA, my 4090 utilisation has a lot of headroom, the CPU use is higher than one would expect normally, but this is UE5 so we have become used to expecting the unexpected.
The bad? There are random fps drops, like the first area when walking into the town centre if I look back at the row of first houses by the 2 cars before that area the fps suddenly drops from 120+ to 70+ for no reason at all then as I walk further it returns to normal. We saw similar with SH2:R. I suspect this is shader comp happening in realtime as you progress. Did not see it again in the rest of the hour though.
The other thing is when Reflex is turned on you get 10fps hit and moving the camera horizontally shows some micro juddering even though the framerates and frametime is good. This has been seen in other games before too where panning judder was a thing until patched. Turning Reflex off solves both judder and the 10fps hit.
I am in a niche case obviously since this is on a 4090 and any hitches don't last long enough to be an annoyance, lower cards will suffer more no doubt.
Other than that the atmosphere and overall mechanics of using the CRTV and how it all feels is very Alien: Isolation (same people after all). the audio ambience, the mood, how clean Hardware RT is as you get crisp reflections and none of the usual UE Lumen boiling artefacts etc.
I would say it's launched in a better technical state than a typical UE5 release for the most part, but for lower spec systems the issues will be amplified.
Nice to see Reflex as an option though even as there is no frame gen option in the game, you also have an FOV slider as well as not only refresh rate lock to vsync for those who want it, but also an FPS limiter that seems to work effectively.
No black level lift either for OLED users.
I did try enabling Ray Reconstruction via Engine.ini line additions like you could in both SH2:R and SH:f, but it does not seem to do anything in Townfall, although I suspect it's being used anyway as reflections and texture detail appear to align with what is seen with RR anyway and the game ships with the RR dll.
^Well that explains why the town went to pot, they let the boats in!!
EDIT*
Noticed a major resolution issue actually having watched back, you may find that the resolution internally is 1440p if your monitor is 4K, I just noticed this which explains the higher fps using native lol, just toggled the fullscreen/windows borderless back and forth and now it's showing as internal 4K instead of 1440p.
Another UE5 bug that was seen in other games before being patched.
Performance is still high, but not as high as a result of solving this...
I did a gameplay video which recorded at 4K non problems, but screenshots were saved at 1440P, so definitely something buggy going on with the game/engine.
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