The Sinking City-10
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The Sinking City suffers from stuttering issues, NVIDIA RTX2080Ti cannot maintain 60fps in 4K/Ultra

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The Sinking City is a new third-person game that a lot of Lovecraftian fans have been looking forward to. Since the embargo for the game has been lifted, we’ve decided to share our initial performance impressions as well as some 4K screenshots on Ultra settings.

In order to capture the following 4K screenshots, we used an Intel i7 4930K (overclocked at 4.2Ghz) with 16GB of DDR3 RAM at 2133Mhz, NVIDIA’s RTX 2080Ti, Windows 10 64-bit and the GeForce driver 430.86.

As the title suggests, and as you can see from our 4K screenshots gallery, NVIDIA’s most powerful gaming graphics card was unable to run the game smoothly in 4K and on Ultra settings. Our EVGA GeForce RTX 2080Ti XC Gaming GPU was clocked at 1800Mhz, was used to its fullest, and was able to push an average of around 59fps and a minimum of 46fps. Yeah, the average framerate is close to 60fps however we at DSOGaming consider a “60fps” game when the minimum framerate is at least at 57-58fps. Suffice to say that at 1440p the game was running silky smooth with an average of 104fps.

Furthermore, The Sinking City suffers from some really frustrating stuttering issues. These stutters occur on both AMD’s and NVIDIA’s hardware, and can be easily re-produced. The stutters happen when the game loads new areas and while PC gamers can minimize them by installing the game on an SSD, they are still present. We’ve included below a video showing our benchmark scene and these stuttering issues that currently plague the PC version.

The Sinking City - PC Stuttering Issues + Benchmark Scene

What’s really interesting here is that these stutters are more noticeable when the game runs at high framerates. When we locked the game at 30fps, we saw a minimal reduction of these stutters. As such, the console versions – or the PC version when running at 30fps – may have less stutters than the PC version when running at 70fps or higher.

The game is locked by default at 60fps, however we were able to unlock it by changing the “FrameRateLimit” option in the “GameUserSettings.ini” (that’s how we also locked the framerate to 30fps).

We’ve already informed Bigben and Frogwares about these stuttering issues so hopefully there will be a post-launch patch that will address them.

Our PC Performance Analysis for The Sinking City will go live when the game officially releases on June 27th (as always, we test the retail version when a game faces minor performance/optimization issues). Until then, enjoy the following screenshots!