The Blood of Dawnwalker PC Stutter Persists After Hotfix 1.0.5

Tomaszkiewicz's 120 FPS comments come with a promise to keep optimizing​

Read in full, his remarks are more balanced than the headline suggests. Asked why the PC version didn't run well at launch, he said there are "a lot" of PC hardware combinations, too many for the studio to test. He then described the work in progress: "We're observing this, we're trying to ask people about the hardware, and we are trying to do the fixes."

The part that got attention came next. He described players complaining that a game running well above 60 FPS delivers 90 or 70 instead of 120, and said: "It's like, I understand that but the game is about something else. It's not a shooter - it's not a game where it's so important." Eurogamer notes that he sounded exasperated when he said it.

He didn't stop there. In the same answer he said: "But people want to have good performance or performance above good: it's fine. We're working on it and we will still work on it." So this is a director who doesn't think very high frame rates matter much for his genre, while still committing the studio to more optimization. He hasn't refused to optimize, and he hasn't promised that any particular system will hit 120 FPS.

Wccftech's Francesco De Meo partly agreed that a single-player RPG gains little from very high frame rates. He argued that once players get used to smoother, more responsive play, it's hard to go back. That's a reasonable preference. Still, the argument over 90 versus 120 FPS applies to players on high-end hardware. Many other PC players are dealing with something else.

DSOGaming's tests point to stutter, not a missing 120 FPS​

The best independent picture of the launch build comes from DSOGaming, which tested the game twice. Its results come from one outlet's hardware and one test location, so they aren't universal numbers. They do show why "performance" covers more than average FPS in this case.

In a launch-day report on September 3, DSOGaming used a Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 32 GB of DDR5-6000, an RTX 5090, Windows 10 64-bit and GeForce driver 616.64. The prologue ran smoothly. Once the tester reached the first village, the game stuttered every time the camera turned, and the outlet stressed that these were not traversal stutters. In a third-person action RPG where you move the camera constantly, that problem appears all the time. With Unreal Engine 5's Lumen lighting, the same machine ran at 45–50 FPS at native 4K Ultra, and DLSS Quality kept it above 60 FPS.

DSOGaming also found that most cutscenes were locked to 30 FPS. The cutscenes where players make decisions ran unlocked, and the outlet said switching between the two feels disorienting.

Its full performance analysis on September 13 widened the test. On the same Ryzen 9 7950X3D platform, it ran Radeon RX 6900 XT, RX 7900 XTX and RX 9070 XT cards alongside Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti, RTX 3080, RTX 4090, RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 cards, using GeForce 616.92 and Radeon Adrenalin 26.9.1. The game has no built-in benchmark, so the outlet tested in the first village, which it called one of the more demanding early areas.

The outlet called the game GPU-heavy. The RTX 5090 was fully loaded even at 1080p, so most players will be limited by their graphics card rather than their CPU. The game supports DLSS, FSR and Intel XeSS upscaling, plus DLSS Frame Gen and FSR Frame Gen. It does not support DLSS Multi-Frame Gen. On the positive side, DSOGaming found that performance scales well with lower settings.

Stutter is where DSOGaming stayed critical. By September 13, the camera stutters it had reported were still there, and it had also found traversal stutters. Taken together, these results suggest the loudest "not 120 FPS" complaints come from high-end systems, while a much wider group of players is dealing with frame-time spikes. A higher average frame rate doesn't fix those spikes. Tomaszkiewicz's framing puts the two complaints together, and he doesn't address the stutter reports directly.

Hotfixes 1.0.4 and 1.0.5 target GameInput and shader compilation​

The promise of more work is easier to judge against what Rebel Wolves has already shipped. The studio released a string of PC hotfixes in the game's first week, and each targets a specific cause rather than performance in general.

Fan-run guide sites that relay the studio's early known-issues notes say Rebel Wolves acknowledged Windowed/Borderless stutter, shader-compilation crashes and PS5 button mapping. The official workaround published with Hotfix 1.0.2 was simple: if the game stutters in Windowed or Borderless mode, switch to Full Screen.

Hotfix 1.0.4, released September 9, is the one most relevant to Windows. Along with stability improvements and fixes for quest-progression and save-blocking bugs, it addressed FPS drops that happened when a controller was connected on systems with outdated GameInput software. GameInput is Microsoft's input API for Windows. The same patch fixed VSync problems when FSR Frame Generation was on. Guide sites summarise it as fixing Steam GameInput-related FPS drops when a controller connects. It's a narrow fix for one trigger, but it's worth knowing about if your frame rate drops only when a gamepad is plugged in.

Hotfix 1.0.5 followed on September 10 with an improved shader-compilation pipeline. The Steam announcement said this "can fix stuttering issues for some users." The wording is limited on purpose. Unreal Engine 5 games commonly hitch when shaders compile, and a better compilation pipeline can reduce that. DSOGaming's September 13 test, run after both hotfixes, still found camera and traversal stutter, so 1.0.5 didn't solve the whole problem.

Rebel Wolves' early-October patch covers more than frame rates​

Performance was only one topic in the Eurogamer interview. Tomaszkiewicz described a "big patch" that he expected to arrive "somewhere in the beginning of October." That's a forward-looking estimate from an interview. Rebel Wolves hasn't posted it as a confirmed release date, and nobody has given a date for when the PC optimization work will be finished.

The biggest planned change is a new, easier difficulty level. The game's current easiest mode, Story, will get a new name, and Tomaszkiewicz suggested "Demanding or something like this," so treat that name as a placeholder. A new Story mode will sit below it for players who want the narrative without the combat challenge. Eurogamer reports the game will end up with five difficulty levels, topped by Duelist, which removes the directional attack indicators.

Combat targeting and the camera are also getting attention. Tomaszkiewicz admitted that the way a stun-like crowd-control ability switches your target was intentional. He had wanted to stun one enemy and move to another without accidentally hitting the stunned one and breaking the stun. After player complaints, the patch will remove the automatic switch, and enemies will take three hits to break the stun. He was openly unsure how that would feel.

Running away from fights is being reworked too. Tomaszkiewicz said escaping will ignore the navigation mesh so it feels fluid instead of clunky, and players shouldn't get stuck on scenery. Animals will still try to hit a player who provokes them while moving fast in wolf form or witch-sprint, but if they miss, the player can keep going. One common complaint won't be addressed: enemies that take a long time to kill. Tomaszkiewicz said that depends heavily on your build and gear, and that cutting enemy health too far would let strong builds one-shot everything.

What this means for Dawnwalker PC players​

Whether to act depends on the problem you have. If the game runs at 70–90 FPS and feels smooth, the director has told you plainly that 120 FPS isn't a priority, and the October patch is unlikely to change that. If you're seeing hitches when you turn the camera or move through the world, that is the problem independent testers have documented, and it's worth isolating before you lower every setting.

For stutter, guide writers suggest a controlled test: use the same resolution, graphics settings, and demanding location, repeat one identical camera pan in Windowed or Borderless mode, then repeat it in Fullscreen, and compare the hitch and frame-time behavior rather than only the average FPS. That tells you whether the display-mode stutter the studio acknowledged is affecting you. Driver updates are worth keeping in mind too: installing a new driver can delete the existing shader cache and trigger another round of compilation, so expect some extra hitching right after an update.

• Confirm your game is on Hotfix 1.0.5 or later, since that build includes the shader-compilation pipeline improvements that can reduce stutter for some systems.
• If you play on a controller and your frame rate drops only when it's connected, you're looking at the outdated-GameInput problem that Hotfix 1.0.4 targeted.
• If you're stuttering in Windowed or Borderless mode, try Fullscreen first; it's the developer's own documented workaround and easy to undo.
• DSOGaming found Ultra settings expensive for little visual gain; its suggestion was a mix of High and Ultra, then an upscaler, and frame generation only once the base frame rate is healthy.
• Some players are trying community mods such as "Optimized Tweaks," but the mod (nor any similar mods) cannot fix the game; it can only make it run better, according to its author.
• Consider waiting for the early-October patch before starting a new playthrough if the easier difficulty or the fixes for escaping combat matter to you.

Tomaszkiewicz's comment about 120 FPS will get the attention, but the part that matters for PC players is his commitment to keep working on performance. The shipped hotfixes show Rebel Wolves fixing specific, identifiable causes: GameInput controller drops, FSR Frame Generation VSync and shader compilation. The camera and traversal stutter DSOGaming measured is still the biggest outstanding issue. The early-October patch is the next checkpoint, and whether it fixes that stutter will say more about the PC version than any argument over 120 FPS.