Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn is misfiring with major stutter on the Game Pass version

Edwin’s been appreciating the acrobatic twist that Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn puts on the Soulslite formula, but not everybody’s magical zip-zooping has been going as smoothly. Following the Steam and PC Game Pass releases yesterday, there are widespread reports of heavy stuttering spoiling the fun; I’ve given both versions a test, and indeed, Flintlock does have a serious case of the framerate stammers. Especially the Game Pass build, which is significantly worse for it.

The Steam version sees occasional hitching, usually when you and your god-fox mate enter a new area for the first time. Classic shader compilation stutter, looks like. On Game Pass, though, performance can also hiccup on attacks, dodges, and double-jumps, more keenly impacting the game’s flow. That’s all on an RTX 4060 with the game running at 1080p, by the by, so well above Flintlock’s recommended settings.

What’s to be done? A pinned thread on the game’s Steam forums suggest any of three remedies: disabling Nvidia Reflex, updating your graphics drivers, and "selecting different Super Sampling options", these being upscalers like DLSS. The latter will raise average framerates versus native-rez rendering, which might at least hide the stutters a bit better, though I was playing on the very latest GeForce drivers and was still stuttering on an all-too-regular basis. Of the three fixes, the one I had the most unqualified success with was disabling Nvidia Reflex, meaning Flintlock gets to join Horizon Forbidden West in the Games That Allow Input Latency Reducers To Hurt Performance Somehow club. Hopefully the former can find a fix like the latter did.

Also – and this is just from my own testing on a single GPU, so your results may vary – I found that reducing Shadow Quality can both soothe the stuttering and deliver a huge boost to performance in general. Starting with Ultra quality, my PC was averaging 55-60fps in most areas, which lept to a mostly wobble-free 90-100fps with shadows on Medium. Consider giving that a go, before cutting back on upscaling quality.

Unfortunately, this is not a new problem, even for Flintlock specifically – the action-RPG’s June demo was prone to shuddering as well. And as for why the Game Pass version performs worse than Steam’s, this is at least partly explained by the fact that they are literally different versions, owing to Microsoft’s policy of forcing all games available on the Xbox app to go through their own certification process. This can hold up performance patches, and in extreme cases even lead to PC games lacking entire features in their Game Pass build – Palworld being a recent, though no less silly, example.