Bethesda offers advice on poor Dishonored 2 PC performance

Bethesda has admitted to problems with the PC port of Dishonored 2, offering a list of advice for improving its performance for those suffering from low framerates and glitching.

Developed by Arkane Studios and launched in October 2012, Dishonored was well-received as an engrossing mix of stealth and first-person shooting action set in an innovative steampunkesque world. Its sequel has been expected to do well, but publisher Bethesda has admitted that the PC port of the game isn't quite living up to expectations thanks to graphical glitches and poor performance on many systems.

Although the company is likely working on a patch to improve matters, Bethesda's primary response has been to issue a list of advice on how users can work around the performance glitches. Many of these involve, unsurprisingly, lowering the settings: Bethesda warns that the 1440p resolution option should be used 'only if you have a very high-end GPU' equivalent to a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 or better, and that most users should play at lower resolutions; that V-Sync should not be disabled; and that the game's Adaptive Resolution mode, which changes the resolution at which the engine renders content in response to framerate fluctuations, should be lowered from its default value of 75 percent of the primary resolution to 50 percent.

Bethesda's advice also suggests using the game's automatic settings in the Advanced menu to configure the engine to match a PC's performance, and to disable TXAA antialiasing and lowering texture details. The remaining tips are more general: avoiding using Alt-Tab to switch to and from background software while the game is running, and minimising the number of other applications running at the same time as the game.