Yesterday saw a surprise demo drop for Persona developer Atlus’s latest game, Metaphor: ReFantazio. The enormous fantasy RPG is due out October 11, but roughly six hours of the game are already available, across consoles and PC. Except, it turns out that PC version isn’t working out so well.
The extraordinarily huge 43 GB demo is struggling with performance issues, as players report stuttering and a number claim the game is only running on one CPU core. This means a game that doesn’t exactly push graphical boundaries is seeing its framerate leap about uncomfortably, despite running smoothly on PS5 and Xbox Series.
This matched my own initial experiences. My PC is a few years old now, but remains a decent AMD Ryzen 5 5600X, with 32 MB RAM, and a GeForce RTX 3070. Despite the first playable section of the game running at a smooth 60 FPS, as soon as I was in the first busy combat, it was jumping all over the place, rarely dipping below 40, but changing so frequently as to be extremely distracting. (I’m no framerate weirdo, and would be very happy to play at a steady 40 FPS, but the jittering between is the issue.)
The demo also lacks a large number of standard PC graphics settings, without even options for anti-aliasing, which suggests a dubious port of the console version, for the demo at least. It’s something PC players see too often, where vital settings required to play properly on the wheezing towers are missing. It also raises concerns for those hoping to play the full game on their PC in three weeks’ time. We’ve reached out to Sega and Atlus to ask about all this.
Possible ways to fix Metaphor: ReFantazio’s performance issues
However, some are suggesting some solutions. Reading through Steam reviews of the demo—which are currently a mix of people furious about how badly it runs, and other people telling them that they’re wrong—it seems the most frequent solution on offer is to reduce the game’s rendering scale. Which sounds like a bummer of a fix, until you learn that the game is frequently defaulting to 125 to 150 percent in the first place. My own launched at 125 percent.
And yeah, it worked. I put it down to 100 percent (of what? I’m honestly not sure—I feel like more than 100 percent should have had the game hanging out the sides of my monitor, but the options go from 50 percent to 200), and then I was hitting a solid 60FPS in busy streets packed with dozens of NPCs.
In fact, after changing this I was able to put Texture Quality up to High and didn’t see any performance knock at all. And this is all running at 2560×1440 in a window.
GamesRadar also spotted a Reddit thread that suggests a slightly harder-core solution (pun so very much intended). With the game running, open Task Manager (Ctrl Shift Esc is a neat shortcut for this!), choose the Details tab, then right click on METAPHOR.exe and choose “set affinity.” Deselect all the cores but one, hit OK, then do it again and re-select all the cores. Apparently this will help if rendering scale does not. I tried it too, and yeah, I then put my rendering scale up to 150 percent, and my framerate hovered between 55 and 60. Which is good enough for me!
Hopefully, by the time the game comes out October 11, the PC version will feature a far better suite of options, including standards like anti-aliasing, DLSS, etc, and have any core use bugs ironed out. In the meantime, these fixes worked for me and others.
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