The Blood of Dawnwalker director questions the 'point' of 120 FPS as players continue reporting stuttering issues after hotfix 1.05 hits Steam

The Blood of Dawnwalker’s director, Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, recently sat down with Eurogamer and explained that he doesn’t understand the appeal of 120 FPS or why gamers tend to complain about frame rates below that threshold, especially in an RPG that is already running above 60 FPS. Meanwhile, developer Rebel Wolves continues its post-launch PC patch efforts.

Stutter issues for PC users persist for now

The recently released The Blood of Dawnwalker Patch 1.05 on Steam addressed the shader compilation issue that stalled Unreal Engine 5’s rendering. Additionally, DSOGaming benchmarked The Blood of Dawnwalker hotfix 1.05 days later and found that traversal and camera stutter still persist, despite the update being explicitly designed to resolve the problem.

Meanwhile, Konrad Tomaszkiewicz still doesn’t see the appeal of a high frame rate with optimal frame times in a single-player vampire RPG. He made this clear in an interview about the game’s post-launch roadmap, three weeks after The Blood of Dawnwalker was marred by stuttering issues.

In the interview, Konrad called the “120 FPS” target the loudest complaint, even though the game reaches more than 60 FPS. He explained:

“We’re observing this, we’re trying to ask people about the hardware, and we are trying to do the fixes. But yes, when you see that the game works well over 60 FPS, people complain that it’s not 120, but 90 or 70… It’s like, I understand, but the game is about something else. It’s not a shooter. It’s not a game where it’s so important.”

While Konrad Tomaszkiewicz's statement is fair for the most part, the unresolved stutter issue persists despite the new hotfix, which focused on the “shader compilation pipeline.”

Unreal Engine might be a limiting factor

For context, Unreal Engine 5 treats each shader as a pipeline-specific object, or PSO. When players encounter an uncompiled PSO and the engine starts compiling it during gameplay, stuttering kicks in. This mainly occurs when players turn the camera or traverse new terrain. 

Despite work on the shader pipeline, the stuttering issue hasn’t disappeared, and it remains a well-documented Unreal Engine 5 problem, as seen previously in Immortals of Aveum in 2023.

Currently, Rebel Wolves has a lot on its plate as it continues to roll out fixes for The Blood of Dawnwalker and finally address the traversal issues. While the hotfix improved the compilation pipeline, the stuttering persists regardless of the frame rate gamers ask for.

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