Lords of the Fallen's latest update fixes a long-standing issue in the PC version

Lords of the Fallen recently got another major title update on the PC and consoles, which aims to rectify numerous technical issues with this game. However, unbeknownst to many, this patch also fixes one of the biggest issues plaguing LOTF's PC version since its release on October 13, 2023.

CI Games and Hexworks have been working on eradicating a plethora of gameplay and technical issues in their latest soulslike, action-role-playing game following its launch.

A major issue I, alongside many other players, faced with this title's PC version was shader compilation stutters — especially upon first installing the game or updating graphics drivers. Fortunately, with the latest update, that issue seems to have been fixed in Lords of the Fallen.

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Lords of the Fallen's latest update fixes shader compilation stutters on PC and also improves overall game performance

Being built on Unreal Engine 5.1, Lords of the Fallen is one of the most visually stunning soulslike games out there, even rivaling Bluepoint's Demon's Souls remake. However, its graphical prowess comes at the cost of massive hardware requirements. The game requires at least an RX590 — and that's just for 720p30fps.

However, if you're looking to play this title at native 1080p at a smooth 60fps, you will need something like an RTX 3060 or RX 6600 XT. And even with those GPUs, you will have to tone down the graphics settings to Medium-High to achieve the desired 60fps gameplay experience.

Unfortunately, upon its release, Lords of the Fallen was packed with a plethora of technical issues that prevented even the most powerful of GPUs from delivering stable framerates. The biggest culprit for the game's sub-par performance on PCs was the age-old issue of shader compilation stutters.

Despite featuring a lengthy shader pre-compilation, CI Games' latest soulslike failed to eliminate any rendering-related stutters during gameplay. This problem was even more apparent during the game's first boot after a fresh install or graphics driver update.

Essentially, every time you update your graphics drivers, it flushes the old pre-compiled shader date from its memory to make room for new ones. This forces you to have to once again sit through the rather lengthy shader compilation process for DX12 games that support it.

However, in most games, once the shader compilation step is complete, it eliminates any potential shader-related stuttering instances. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case with Lords of the Fallen. Even after a lengthy shader pre-compilation step at the start of the game, it still exhibited massive stutters for a long time during gameplay, which wasn't ideal.

However, with the most recent update, this issue seems to have been addressed. I've tested the latest update on my PC (Ryzen 5 5600, RX 6600, 16GB DDR4 RAM, 2TB Gen3 NVMe SSD). During my time with the game so far, I've not experienced the same shader pre-compilation stutters that used to be a regular sight after every other title update.

The game also seems to be less CPU intensive following the update, which helped increase performance by roughly 4-5%. This is especially apparent in the title's Skyrest Bridge area, which used to heavily tank CPU usage while dropping GPU usage below 90%.