Since the launch of Outriders, the game’s PC version (Steam & Epic Games Store) has suffered due to performance-related issues, among other things. Most notable, stuttering, which happens randomly. It doesn’t matter if you’re running an AMD or Intel processor or an AMD or Nvidia GPU; every one has noticed some stuttering with the game.
So far, I’ve been trying several different methods to try and stop the stuttering, and so far, I feel this has done the best for me. Since I’ve made the following changes, I’ve yet to experience any stuttering on either of my two machines with AMD Ryzen processors and Nvidia RTX GPUs. Your mileage may vary, but I feel this will fix your issues. This also has worked for both DirectX 11 and Direct 12 and the older and newer Nvidia drivers.
Adding Windows Defender exclusion for Outriders
We’re going to add an exception to the Windows Defender, the built-in Anti-Virus program in Windows 10. If you’ve disabled this, this will still work for other Anti-Virus programs, but you’ll need to figure out how to add the exceptions.
- To get started, type ” Windows Security” into the Windows 10 search bar or go to PC Settings -> Windows Security.
- From there, select “Virus & threat protection.”
- Under the “Virus & threat protection settings,” select “Manage settings.”
- Scroll down, locate “Exclusions” and select “Add or remove exclusions.”
- Click “Add an exclusion and select folder.
- Navigate to the install location of Outriders. The drive letter will vary, but the install path will always be “SteamLibrary -> steamapps -> common -> OUTRIDERS.”
- Select the entire folder by clicking “Select Folder” on the bottom right-hand side
- Do the same thing for “%appdata% -> Local -> Madness” or “C:\Users\yourname\AppData\Local\Madness”
Why does this work?
When you have an Anti-Virus app on your PC, such as Windows Defender, it can manually run or via real-time protection. And when it scans, it can introduce some degradation to everything it is scanning. So as you’d already deduced, if it scans the install folder while you’re playing, you’ll see the degradation while playing the game. The other opinion is to disable the real-time protection, but I wouldn’t recommend doing that. It’s better to add the game as an exclusion, so it skips the folder.
That’s it, implement this, and hopefully, this will fix correct your stuttering issues.
Outriders is now available for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PC, and Stadia.
