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

Graphics Cards Tested:

Drivers Used

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.

ULTRA PRESET

HIGH PRESET

MEDIUM PRESET

LOW PRESET

UHD 4K Preset Scaling Ryzen 9 3900x + RTX 3090

AVG FPS

1% percentile

0

40

80

120

160

200

240

0

40

80

120

160

200

240

Ultra 82

67

High 104

86

Medium 118

99

Low 142

114

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.

DLSS OFF

DLSS QUALITY

DLSS BALANCED

DLSS PERFORMANCE

DLSS Ultra Performance

UHD 4K DLSS Scaling Ryzen 9 3900x + RTX 3090

AVG FPS

1% percentile

0

40

80

120

160

200

240

0

40

80

120

160

200

240

Native 82

67

Quality 104

85

Balanced 120

95

Performance 133

105

Ultra Performance 156

115

Outriders Graphics Card Results

*DLSS settings below are all using the QUALITY preset as recommended above

1080p

Standard 1080p Ultra Performance

AVG FPS

1% percentile

0

50

100

150

200

250

300

0

50

100

150

200

250

300

RTX 3090 (DLSS) 207

139

RTX 3090 199

135

RTX 3080 (DLSS) 204

132

RTX 3080 187

128

RTX 2080 Ti (DLSS) 155

118

RTX 2080 Ti 141

106

RTX 3070 (DLSS) 164

120

RTX 3070 147

111

RTX 3060 Ti (DLSS) 150

112

RTX 3060 Ti 132

103

RTX 3060 (DLSS) 117

92

RTX 3060 100

80

RX 6900 XT 194

136

RX 6800 XT 184

134

RX 6800 149

115

RX 6700 XT 130

105

Ultrawide 1080p

Ultrawide 1080p Ultra Performance

AVG FPS

1% percentile

0

40

80

120

160

200

240

0

40

80

120

160

200

240

RTX 3090 (DLSS) 184

126

RTX 3090 167

120

RTX 3080 (DLSS) 177

122

RTX 3080 154

117

RTX 2080 Ti (DLSS) 131

102

RTX 2080 Ti 117

91

RTX 3070 (DLSS) 138

107

RTX 3070 121

94

RTX 3060 Ti (DLSS) 126

95

RTX 3060 Ti 108

85

RTX 3060 (DLSS) 98

81

RTX 3060 85

67

RX 6900 XT 162

118

RX 6800 XT 152

116

RX 6800 125

97

RX 6700 XT 107

87

1440p

Standard 1440p Ultra Performance

AVG FPS

1% percentile

0

40

80

120

160

200

240

0

40

80

120

160

200

240

RTX 3090 (DLSS) 170

122

RTX 3090 146

112

RTX 3080 (DLSS) 159

117

RTX 3080 137

110

RTX 2080 Ti (DLSS) 117

95

RTX 2080 Ti 99

78

RTX 3070 (DLSS) 123

100

RTX 3070 103

84

RTX 3060 Ti (DLSS) 112

99

RTX 3060 Ti 93

77

RTX 3060 (DLSS) 87

73

RTX 3060 70

57

RX 6900 XT 140

107

RX 6800 XT 131

103

RX 6800 108

90

RX 6700 XT 91

77

Ultrawide 1440p

Ultrawide 1440p Ultra Performance

AVG FPS

1% percentile

0

40

80

120

160

200

240

0

40

80

120

160

200

240

RTX 3090 (DLSS) 140

108

RTX 3090 119

90

RTX 3080 (DLSS) 128

100

RTX 3080 109

88

RTX 2080 Ti (DLSS) 96

78

RTX 2080 Ti 80

66

RTX 3070 (DLSS) 100

83

RTX 3070 82

68

RTX 3060 Ti (DLSS) 91

74

RTX 3060 Ti 74

63

RTX 3060 (DLSS) 69

58

RTX 3060 54

45

RX 6900 XT 112

88

RX 6800 XT 104

87

RX 6800 86

71

RX 6700 XT 72

60

UHD 4K

UHD 4K Ultra Performance

AVG FPS

1% percentile

0

40

80

120

160

200

240

0

40

80

120

160

200

240

RTX 3090 (DLSS) 104

85

RTX 3090 82

67

RTX 3080 (DLSS) 97

72

RTX 3080 75

61

RTX 2080 Ti (DLSS) 71

58

RTX 2080 Ti 55

47

RTX 3070 (DLSS) 72

62

RTX 3070 58

48

RTX 3060 Ti (DLSS) 66

54

RTX 3060 Ti 51

43

RTX 3060 (DLSS) 49

42

RTX 3060 37

30

RX 6900 XT 75

63

RX 6800 XT 70

60

RX 6800 58

49

RX 6700 XT 47

40

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.