If you struggle with frame stuttering and low frame rates in Dune Awakening, there are some things you can try to fix it.
As you play Dune Awakening on PC, you might run into a few issues with the game stuttering or experiencing frame loss. During our testing, we had a few times where our FPS was high, but the game would appear to stutter. We also had instances of the game just losing frames for seemingly no reason.
In this article, we'll list a bunch of fixes that might help you. Note that not every fix will work for you, but these are all fixes that should fix one instance of the problem, so give them a try.
Note: This article is being updated during the game's release to monitor new fixes - the original list is based on the final beta.
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Roll Back Driver Fix
Update - September 1st
For anyone still experiencing the Frame Stutter issue, especially those who had previously fixed it, but it has returned. We managed to fix the issue by returning to the June 17th update mentioned below. This update is 576.80 and includes a small hotfix for Dune Awakening. At some point after this, however, be that other NVIDIA drivers or game updates, this issue has become “unfixed.” It’s most likely a later NVIDIA driver that knocked it out of whack, but below you will find the two ways to fix it with relative ease.
If you only updated away recently, you can roll back to it easily:
- Device Manager
- Graphics Card
- Properties
- Driver tab
- Click Roll Back Driver
- Select 576.80
If the option is greyed out, then it has been too long, and you’ll have to go about it the old way:
- Download NVIDIA update 576.80
- Place it somewhere easy to find, probably just your Desktop for now
- Device Manager
- Graphics Card
- Properties
- Driver Tab
- Uninstall Device
- Install update 576.80
- Restart your computer
- Load Dune Awakening
That process should then fix the game. If not, you have a different issue, and some of our fixes below may help you instead.
Issue Fix - Update June 17th
For those who have had the issue of stuttering since a few days after the June 10th release, for those on Nvidia, a Driver update appears to fix it. Either head to your Nvidia App and download the driver, or head to the official Nvidia Driver page and follow the steps. These are the Game Ready drivers for the FBC Firebreak game, but include a hotfix for "stability" for Dune Awakening. For the most part, it looks to have fixed most people's issues.
SSD/HDD fix
While we were testing the fix, we found something that was happening when the "lag" started. On your control panel, you might see your memory being used a lot, but for us, the spikes always caused our storage (SSD) to spike from 5-10% to up to 50%. We fixed this by clearing out the SSD and giving it a lot more free space. Basically, make sure your drive with Dune on isn't in the red (last 10% of space).
Dune Awakening Frame Stutter and FPS Fix
Below are a number of fixes that might fix your frame stutter issues. We will start with one cause that cannot be fixed, however.
Server Issues
Due to the game running on the same system as Conan Exiles, one stuttering issue is caused by the servers, and not your PC. While this is hard to prove, you can check by looking at the MS (ping) rather than your frames. Simply, the game can't keep up with the amount of data you are sending.
During the big beta weekend, this issue started to happen to a lot of players during the final day of the beta, once the developer opened up the servers to everyone who requested access. The good news here is that the developers have a month to improve the situation, and it's possible that it will be fixed when the game finally launches. Alternatively, the launch could increase their server load and this might get worse.
Settings
Turn off the following settings if you are having frame issues:
- Frame Generation - the implementation for both AMD and Nvidia of this setting is poor and will result in bad frames despite high FPS
- FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) - Despite being an AMD setting, this is on by default for people with Nvidia cards
Turn on/adjust the following settings to fix issues:
- Cap your frame rate to your monitor's refresh rate
GPU Drivers - especially NVIDIA
There have been a lot of public issues with the latest batch of Nvidia drivers, with some developers suggesting you go back to the pre-5000 series drivers for your card. Many reports online have suggested that users not on the newest Nvidia cards have had a number of issues with drivers after 566.36. As a result, it has been said that rolling back your drivers to the Nvidia 566.36 drivers could help.
Improve Frame Rate in Dune Awakening
Lastly, here are some general tips and tricks that can help you improve your frame rates.
- Check settings for defaults - we found that many were set way too high, reduce things like Shadows, view distance, Post Processing and Ground Clutter, etc, to help improve frame rates.
- Disable Motion Blur, Depth of Field, and V-Sync
- Turn off Anti-Aliasing or switch to FXAA instead of TAA
- Reduce overall settings down a level to see if things improve
- Lower your resolution - While it's a bit of a last resort, it's likely the largest single improvement you can make
We will update this post once the game launches with more fixes and solutions.
