How To Reduce Stuttering In Avowed On PC

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Avowed is the spiritual successor of Obsidian Entertainment's Pillars of Eternity CRPG franchise. A medium-scale RPG set in the same universe, it offers an expansive world, and one that can be demanding on your PC. As with any big game, it's best to fiddle with the graphics settings to get the best experience, especially if you're discovering any performance issues.

Unfortunately, Avowed has a serious stuttering issue on some PCs. It's better felt than explained, but in short, while traversing the world, you'll experience minor stops and starts that add up over time to seriously hinder what could be a smooth experience. Anyone who has experienced a low framerate versus a high framerate will likely have experienced some stutter alongside the former, whereas the latter is much more enjoyable and immersive. The good news is it's possible to improve the situation.

Best Settings To Reduce Stuttering

Different PCs Need Different Solutions

Depending on your PC specifications and configuration, Avowed can have mild to severe stuttering issues. This can be alleviated or potentially dealt with completely in a few ways, but regardless, a stronger PC is more likely to give you a better experience. First thing is first: make sure your graphics drivers are up-to-date by checking the NVIDIA, AMD, or Intel website, as each has drivers specifically optimized for Avowed.

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Our writer Sean Migalla had this to share regarding his experiences playing Avowed extensively with an AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070:

If that doesn't work, you can try disabling Raytracing in the Graphics Settings menu. Though Avowed does not have a truly open world, it is an expansive one, which can make demanding shader-related settings like this that much more taxing. If it doesn't have the desired effect, and you're comfortable with your framerates with it on, simply enable the setting again. However, in combination with reducing overall graphics settings to Medium, it helped my editor (who is rocking a RTX 3080 and 5700X3D combo). While the experience isn't perfect still, it becomes enjoyable enough to keep playing.

What Causes Stuttering?

Unreal Engine's Common Issue

Unfortunately, stuttering has become a common issue among games that use Unreal Engine. For all its great advancements, this one still plagues gamers. Much of the time, stuttering is caused by shader-related features (or rather, a lack of shader optimization). This is likely why disabling Raytracing can be a strong start to fixing the issue, or at least reducing its severity. Overall, Avowed has reviewed well as a smartly designed, tight experience. Most of its issues are technical and can be fixed or alleviated with relative ease by using our tips, and some old-fashioned trial and error.