PSA: Turn off RTX Direct Lighting on Star Wars Outlaws

Turning it off could give a huge boost to performance

Ubisoft

Star Wars Outlaws is an absolutely gorgeous game on both console and PC, and with the right PC settings, you can get a pretty great frame rate without sacrificing beautiful visuals. Unfortunately, one setting in particular is causing some major issues, especially for some of the newest and most powerful graphics cards on the market: RTX Direct Lighting. 

RTX Direct Lighting has a major performance impact, as we mentioned in our guide for the best PC settings for performance in Star Wars Outlaws. In our testing, turning the setting off saw performance boosts of up to 50%, and setting it to Max we saw a huge hit to performance, even on the powerful RTX 4080, dropping the frame rate down into the 70s. 

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This wouldn’t be too bad if playing on a 60Hz monitor, but even then, there are other issues with the setting. We’ve found that having RTX Direct Lighting can not only lower frame rates, but also cause some inconsistency in frame timing, causing an uneven experience that can be quite jarring. When paired with options like frame generation, you can see a lot of problems with frame skipping and performance hitches across the board, especially when traversing the open world. 

RTX Direct Lighting replaces baked-in lighting and shadows with fully ray-traced light and shadows from all light sources, including the dual suns of Tatooine and the seedy underworld cantinas’ neon lights. It results in much more natural lighting, but the effects are fairly hard to notice compared to other lighting options unless you know what you’re looking for. 

Thankfully, players on Xbox Series X|S and PS5 don’t have to worry about any of this. While there are different graphics options on consoles in Star Wars Outlaws, the options are much simpler, and all result in a fairly good experience. It might not have all the bells and whistles possible in the PC version, but it’s consistent, at least. 

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