Dishonored 2 on PC is a shambles. Gamers are experiencing major performance issues with the title, and have taken to Steam to voice their displeasure at the poor level of optimization from developer Arkane Studios.
Steam reviews for the game are currently "mixed", with many reviewers complaining about massive frame rate fluctuations, laggy mouse movements, and an inability to achieve good performance even if they lower their quality settings. Many players are struggling to reach 60 FPS at 1080p with powerful, modern hardware and the latest drivers, and the in-game graphics don't suggest the game should be hard to run.
Bethesda Softworks, publisher of Dishonored 2, released a statement to Polygon suggesting PC gamers should simply reduce the quality settings to a level more reasonable for their hardware. This is despite the fact that reducing the quality settings does not address the performance issues in many cases.
Specifically, Bethesda suggests gamers should lower the resolution and only run at 1440p if you have a high-end GPU such as a GTX 1070 or higher. Steam reviews suggest those with GeForce 10 series cards, including the GTX 1080, are not achieving stutter-free performance at 1440p.
Bethesda also suggests frame rate fluctuations can be resolved by enabling V-sync, and adjusting the Adaptive Resolution to between 50 and 75 percent. Lowering texture levels and disabling TXAA is also supposed to improve performance.
The company did not say whether a patch would be released to address the widespread performance issues.
At this stage it's worth waiting before purchasing Dishonored 2 on PC to see whether Arkane Studios will actually resolve these issues. For now, the game is another poorly optimized mess at launch.