Dishonored 2 Releases PC Performance Patch With Mixed Results

Published: November 21, 2016 9:46 PM /

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Dishonored 2 charts

Following the announcement of the December update including New Game Plus and Custom Difficulty modes, Arkane Studios has released a new patch addressing some of the numerous issues that were impacting Dishonored 2 on PC.

The patch, currently in beta, replaces the 1.1 update and is much more comprehensive update. The patch is focused on improving performance and optimization, changing how the recommended auto-detection for  visuals work, bug fixes and other technical tweaks. Before diving into that some, if you want to try the update, here are a few quick steps to download the patch on Steam:

  1. In Steam, go to your library and right click on Dishonored 2
  2. Select Properties
  3. Select Betas
  4. Using the Dropdown Menu, select BetaPatch
  5. Hit Okay and let the game download the update
It's pretty simple if you want to give it a try, but there are some caveats here, as it appears that this patch is not a universal panacea and that some Nvidia drivers are having issues with Dishonored 2. To be precise, Arkane states that drivers 375.60 and 375.86 have an issue that is unique to Dishonored 2 and strongly advise updating to driver 375.95, which can be found here.

On the other point mentioned, the issue is that while the patch has a relatively lengthy list of fixes, there are numerous reports of it causing issues. Oddest is that the patch seems to be hit/miss for people, with some reporting that it helps, while others are saying that it has actually hurt their performance. So while we go into details here on the patch, do note that how well it has worked for people varies heavily, and you can read examples of these views on the Bethesda's forums or the steam discussion forums on it. The worse cases appear to involve new crashes, visual settings stuck to very low, and frame rates dropping from 30+ to 15-25.

So what does 1.2 address?

First of all, you're looking at more options in regards to V-Sync. You have new framerate limiter options to help set your frame rate, a new triple buffering option, and more there. In related news, one of the issues that may have impacted some things with the game is that the physics are somewhat tied to framerate, with when it went over 120 FPS it caused issues.

A few other major performance things were hit as well. A bug that caused AMD GPUs to have huge frame rate drops when cloth simulation went on was fixed. Another bug that may have hit performance was Water Quality settings, as due to the bug, it was only impacting the ocean, not canals or pools, something that would hit in more wide open areas. They adjusted the Texture Details setting so that it would have a significant impact on performance, and visuals. Finally, they improved CPU core utilization for high and low-end machines.

Mouse settings got another look, although users are reporting that there is still negative acceleration on the mouse. However, they did fix an issue where mouse sensitivity was framerate-dependent and another where the mouse could not change the game's resolution.

Alt-Tab issues have been prominently reported with the game as well, and now they fixed a bug where it could cause endless switching between the game and other programs. Additionally, another bug in that area of code was causing the game to keep registering mouse movements while in the background, but it has been squashed.

There is also a list of known issues there, with what workarounds they know. Hopefully, those will be addressed soon, along with the issues others are reporting. If you want to see if  issues you have are addressed, you can read the full patch notes here.


Quick Take

It's good to see this patch come out, even in an unfinished form showing Arkane's commitment to fixing the PC version of the game which has been a mixed bag - with it working fine for some, and crashing for others. Still, this patch has issues and having people report performance decreases is not encouraging, nor is the fact that negative mouse acceleration is still on there .

This whole thing illustrates the issue with Bethesda's new review policy, as without that restrictive placement, more information on the PC version would have been available for users to make an informed decision on the game. Their 'everyone must experience it together' was silly from the start, and was proven hypocritical when they gave it out to various 'influencers' with deals, and now Dishonored 2 is illustrating why it's bad for consumers, with many ending up with a buggy PC port that there was little pre-launch information on. 

What do you think of this patch for Dishonored 2? Have you run into any performance issues? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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Don Parsons
| Senior Writer

A longtime lover of speculative fiction, in almost all its forms, Don joined TechRaptor in 2014 on a whim sending in an application as he was looking for… More about Don