Performance Guide for Samson

It has been two days since we dropped Samson, and it’s been absolutely magical to see everyone play the game and hear about all of your experiences. Thank you! We’ve been reading through your feedback about the game, and one thing that we have seen come up consistently is performance related questions or issues. So, we thought it would be helpful to put together a quick guide. If you run into performance problems, there are often a few things you can try on your end that may significantly improve your experience.

General Performance and Stability

Something that can immediately help for crashes and otherwise, is to always make sure to update your graphics drivers before playing. If you experience stuttering, restarting your computer or resetting the video drivers (Windows Key + Ctrl + Shift + B) might help. If a computer has been running for more than a day, we have noticed issues where calls to drivers take longer and longer. This is due to driver issues or other software that has reserved video memory, and it shows up in the game as stuttering. Restarting the drivers solves these problems.

VRAM

Minimum 6GB VRAM target is tested with 1920x1080 output resolution with balanced preset, any higher risks running out of memory causing severe performance degradation. DLSS quality modes Ultra Performance & Performance is by default using the DLSS4.5 preset L & M which is quite heavy on 20 & 30 series cards, ex. preset K can be forced in Nvidia App if needed.

System Requirements & Setup

The game requires a DX12-capable discrete video card and 6 GB of video memory on low-quality settings at 1920x1080 output resolution.

Make sure the game is installed on an SSD drive. As an open-world game, Samson is constantly streaming data when you are moving. If the game is installed on a hard drive rather than an SSD, streaming will simply not be fast enough, and the game will pause (i.e. stutter). It does this in order to allow collisions to load, preventing the player from falling through the world. Here's our Minimum required specs:

• Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system

• OS: Windows 10/11

• Processor: Intel Core i5-10505 / AMD Ryzen 5 3600

• Memory: 16 GB RAM

• Graphics: Nvidia® 1070 GTX 8 GB / AMD Radeon™ RX 5600 6 GB

• DirectX: Version 12

• AddedStorage15 GB available space

• Additional Notes: This game requires a SSD hard drive

CPU Performance & Bottlenecks

Samson is CPU-intensive, especially when driving fast around the world. This is because we constantly need to stream in new geometry, vehicles, and characters, and destroy the things you leave behind. Most players we have seen are CPU-limited, and when CPU-limited, the video settings do not matter much. Make sure you do not have other CPU-intensive programs running in the background. We highly recommend using Frame Generation if you are CPU-limited. If you do not see Frame Generation in the menus and have a graphics card that supports it, make sure you are running with an updated driver.

We have three CPU-related performance settings in the Gameplay Menu. Cloth Simulation, Hair Simulation, and Animation Quality.

We have also seen cases where a graphics driver update caused Windows to not report the dedicated graphics card as available to the game on boot, causing a fallback to some other available graphics card. For example, the integrated graphics in the CPU could be selected, which will most likely result in terrible performance and crashes. A restart has solved