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‘Nier: Automata’ fan patch gives a big boost to detail, framerates

By Jon Martindale March 23, 2017

Nier: Automata review — Image used with permission by copyright holder

A patch developed by the fan community surrounding recently released Nier: Automata
has made a difference to many people’s framerates. Anecdotal reports suggest even those who struggled to run the game at the lowest of settings, can now run it maxed out with smooth framerates, Kotaku reports.

Nier: Automata is a fun, philosophical RPG that caught us off guard with just how good it is. However, one area of the game that a lot of people have been complaining about is performance. While the JRPG is hardly the most visually stunning game out there, some users found that even with hefty hardware under the hood, they couldn’t hit steady, playable framerates. The newly released patch, however, looks to have fixed that.

Developed by Steam user Kaldaien, the FAR (Fix Automata Resolution) and lighting performance patch tweaks the game’s settings and makes a few interesting changes to drastically improve performance. It disables the GeForce Experience and Nvidia Shield features, limits the maximum framerate to 60, uses triple rather than quad-buffering to reduce input latency, and changes the pre-render frame limit to three, among other tweaks.

While we can’t comment directly on the viability of this patch, a number of users have reported an improvement in the game’s overall performance. One Redditor claims it took them from 45FPS on the lowest settings, to 60FPS with everything maxed out. Many others in that same thread confirmed benefits on their own systems, while another user on Steam claims that they were able to double their anti-aliasing and have better framerates too.

If you want to try out the patch yourself, you can download it from Kaldaien’s GitHub page, where frequent updates are forthcoming. The developer has promised to continue tweaking the patch, adding a new frame-pacing limiter in the coming days, which we’re told could help reduce cutscene stuttering.

It is worth stating, however, that this is a fan-made patch and is not officially supported in any manner. It could make changes to your game that you aren’t expecting, so be careful downloading it. Make sure to run anti-virus software and back up any important game files before installing it.

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