After two beta weekends, it is safe to say that many Marvel fans are incredibly excited for the upcoming release of Marvel's Avengers. The loot-based action game has made a lot of promises about what the campaign and postgame will offer, but people playing on PC are more concerned about how the finished title will run.
Several weeks ago, Crystal Dynamics released the system requirements for the game on Steam, and many fans were excited that older hardware would be able to handle Avengers. However, after getting their hands on the game, it seems as though this isn't the case.
The minimum requirements claim that the game can be run on a five year old graphics card and a six year old CPU, and the recommended specs aren't that much fancier. The problem with releasing requirements along with vague titles, like minimum and recommended, instead of baseline framerates, is that players have no way of correlating the description of the requirements with actual performance. After playing on my own rig, running on parts that are well above the recommended specs and only one month old, I can confidently say that players will need far above the recommended components to run the game smoothly.
I'm far from the only person who ran into problems last weekend, too. Several Reddit posts complain about poor optimization on PC, indicating that it's a fairly widespread issue. It was disappointing when my RTX 2060 Super and Ryzen 5 3600 couldn't maintain a steady framerate, but after analyzing what my parts were actually doing while I was playing, it seems the problem mostly lies in CPU usage.
During gameplay, CPU usage would spike to 100% at unexpected points, which caused my entire computer to chug along at molasses pace. At first, I thought this only happened during elevator scenes, when the game loaded areas, and intense mid-gameplay moments. The game did tend to chug whenever Iron Man used his unibeam, with particle effects flying off an enemy's armor, but there would also be times of high usage while walking around in empty environments.
Some users think that the game is accidentally duplicating some particle effects. This means that processors need to work twice as hard to load many of the game's entities. It would explain the random CPU spikes, but the inconsistent use of the graphics card is also concerning.
Throughout the weekend, my average GPU usage would change every time I launched the game. During the first day, it hovered at around 40%, but on Saturday dropped to 14%. It was locked at that low number, and would not budge at all no matter how much I changed the graphics settings. It did start to be utilized more efficiently on the final date - moving between 60% and 70%, with occasional spikes to 100%.
Thankfully, the developers have acknowledged the game's poor performance on PC, and even gave some advice on how to improve the performance yourself. However, their suggestions aren't going to be beneficial for all players, only a select few that are suffering from very specific problems.
There are certain graphical settings that can increase your game's FPS if you're willing to drop the quality. I would recommend reducing the level of detail, and lowering or removing shadows entirely. The latter option will make the game look very different, but the existence of shadows requires computers to simulate and render how light sources are interacting with moving objects and characters. Level of detail is fairly self explanatory: if the game is loading less objects, your computer will inherently be working less.
I wish I could recommend reducing the quality of particle lighting, but in my experience it seemed as though lowering this setting actually made the game run worse. It may have been a glitch, but any time there were sparks or fire-based effects, they would appear as massive pixels that take up nearly a quarter of the screen. Not only does this block your view, it also slows the game down.
All of the other graphics options can be lowered, and depending on your system, they could have varying effects on performance. Turning VSync on or off has different effects on different computers, so try to play around with this setting.
Hopefully the upcoming, open beta weekend for PC will see improvements to the game's optimization. If not, it is still good that the developers have acknowledged the issues and are working on creating a much more optimized edition for the launch in early September.
The next beta weekend starts on August 21 for PC, Xbox One, and PS4. Crystal Dynamics has said that the beta will start at 9:00pm during your timezone, but both previous weekends have started early at 9:00am.