It’s a new day, and another badly-optimized AAA Unreal Engine 5 game has hit store shelves. A couple of YouTubers, including Daniel Owen, have discovered serious performance problems in The Outer Worlds 2 that almost mirror Borderlands 4’s atrocious launch day performance. One of the most problematic graphics settings is the game’s ray tracing mode, which prevents even AMD’s Ryzen 7 9800X3D gaming champ from achieving 60 FPS at resolutions well under 1080p.
The aforementioned YouTuber ran the game across three hardware configurations: one with a Ryzen 5 5600X and a GTX 1070, another with the same chip and an RTX 3080 12GB, and the third with a Ryzen 7 9800X3D paired with an RTX 5090. The two former configurations represent the game’s minimum and recommended system requirements on the game’s Steam page.
Bring a BIG CPU!!! The Outer Worlds 2 PC Performance Tested – YouTube 
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The game struggled to hit 60 FPS on both 5600X-powered configurations. With the GTX 1070, the game was unable to run at even 30 FPS consistently in one of the game’s city areas at low settings with FSR set to performance mode at 1080p (540p internal resolution).
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Switching to the RTX 3080 12GB technically fared much better, with that GPU achieving almost 60 FPS with the same settings. But regardless, it couldn’t maintain a solid 60 FPS at the game’s lowest quality settings.