Witchfire performance with DLSS 3 has not improved and there are stuttering
The Polish indie studio The Astronauts last week released Witchfire in the early access to Epic Games Store. This is the second game of the developer after The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, and this is a completely different genre (first-person shooter in the Rogue-Lite genre in the setting of dark fantasy) compared to that game.
In January 2023, the studio confirmed the support of NVIDIA DLSS 3, saying that this was a simple addition to Witchfire, since it would seem to be impossible from the point of view of the image frequency and image quality.
In the pre -trial interview with the founder and CEO of Adrian Khmelarz, he said about NVIDIA technology:
Having only 67 % of sharpness, let’s call it the image, scaled up to 100 %, perhaps 1 % worse than if it were directly visualized up to 100 %. It sounds strange, it seems impossible, but it’s true. And an increase in the frequency of personnel phenomenal. Thus, for a low price of deterioration of an image of 1%, which in fact does not mean anything, you get much better experience. I like it
Yesterday NVIDIA published a comparative DLSS trailer, which shows that the game works at a speed of more than 200 frames per second with DLSS 3, advertising a performance increase 3 times compared to DLSS disconnected by DLSS.
However, in Witchfire, DLSS frame generation is hardly an improvement in the WCCFTECH tests with the Ryzen 7 7800x3D processor, the RTX 4090 graphic processor and 32 GB of DDR5 RAM. All graphics settings were installed on Ultra, with DLSS supercretion in quality mode (scaling from 1440p).
As you can see in the picture below, the average frame rate increased by only 16 frames per second, that is, an increase by only 8.2%. 1% percentile FPS showed itself relatively better – DLSS 3 scored 15.6 frames per second, but the percentage improvement more than doubled (18.2%). However, FPS percentile 0.2% is only 1.8 FPS, or 4.4%, improved when the DLSS 3 is turned on.
Worse, FPS percentile is 0.2% more than half lower than the percentile indicator 1%. This leads to a deterioration in the quality of the image: stuttering is very noticeable, despite the high average frequency of personnel. According to Capframex, more than 2.1% of the frames were stuttering even when DLSS 3 turned on. This is a much higher percentage than in most games that I have recently tested, in which 1% or less captured personnel classified as a brake is registered.
This is definitely the fact that the developers from The Astronauts need to be improved during the early access period.