SEGA has just released a demo of Metaphor ReFantazio on PC and consoles. The game uses P-Studio’s proprietary engine which was used in Persona 5, P4D, P3D, P5D, P5R. And, sadly for all ATLUS fans, it appears that the game suffers from MAJOR optimization issues.

To be honest, I never planned to cover this game. At first glance, it looked like it would run with no trouble at all on PC. After numerous reports, though, I’ve decided to test it. And yes, the game is currently a mess.

For our benchmarks, we used an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 32GB of DDR5 at 6000Mhz, and NVIDIA’s RTX 4090. We also used Windows 10 64-bit, and the GeForce 561.09 driver. Moreover, we’ve disabled the second CCD on our 7950X3D.

On this high-end PC, the game has trouble running with 60fps at 4K/Max Settings. Now contrary to what you may think, we are not GPU-limited. Instead, the game suffers from optimizations that prevent it from using the GPU at 100%.

Here are some screenshots. As you can see, GPU utilization is all over the place. When facing a lot of enemies in the desert, the NVIDIA RTX 4090 is used at only 46%. This usually means a CPU bottleneck but if you look at the CPU usage, none of our CPU cores is maxed out.

At first, things look a bit better in the first town you visit. Once you turn the camera, though, all hell breaks loose. GPU usage, once again, drops to really low levels.

My guess is that we’re looking here at a RAM limitation. The engine appears to be overwhelmed with drawcalls that it cannot efficiently handle. We’ve seen this in the past in very unoptimized titles. But we’re talking here about a DDR5 at 6000Mhz. And we are struggling to get 60fps. That doesn’t bode well for everyone who uses weaker RAM modules.

ATLUS will have to make major optimization improvements to this game. Frankly, though, I don’t expect this to happen. You see, ATLUS has been avoiding the PC for a long time. So, it’s unlikely to see them pushing any major performance updates, at least for the PC. I’ve heard that the console versions also suffer from some performance issues, but not to the extent we see on PC. Not only that but mouse controls are awful.

In short, you should stay away from this mess if you are gaming on the PC. This is one of the worst PC ports we’ve seen lately. So, congrats ATLUS for making a PS4-looking game that, at best, stresses high-end PCs. And that, right there, is the definition of an unoptimized mess.

UPDATE:

Kaldaien has released a Special K Mod that fixes the performance issues in this title. As the modder noted, Metaphor ReFantazio has insane timing code issues under the hood that are causing the aforementioned performance issues.

So I went ahead and tried the mod. And yes, I can confirm that it really fixes the game’s performance issues. However, it exposes another major optimization issue.

Here are two screenshots from the area that struggled to run with 60fps. As you can see, we now get 90+fps in that very same scene. However, pay close attention to the CPU usage. As you will see, CPU5 core is maxed out and as such, we are now CPU-limited even at 4K. And that’s the other major optimization issue I was referring to. Metaphor ReFantazio relies heavily on one CPU core/thread. Therefore, even with this performance fix, the game will have performance issues on CPUs that lack great IPC performance.

As I said, I don’t expect ATLUS to address this CPU optimization issue. So, let’s at least hope they will implement Kaldaien’s fix in the final version.

Before closing, I should note that the game was crashing when I was using Kaldaien’s Mod with MSI Afterburner. I was able to replicate this multiple times. Don’t know really why it’s happening. Still, if your game crashes with the mod, you should make sure to close MSI Afterburner and Rivatunner.

You can download Kaldaien’s Special K Performance Fix for Metaphor ReFantazio from here.

Stay tuned for more!