Copyright Wccftech
As of the publication of this article, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 is finally out on all platforms. It took 21 years and a near-cancellation to get this sequel, which is really more of a spiritual successor, but those who have been yearning for a new action roleplaying game in the world of Vampire: The Masquerade now have a new game to play. In my review, I wrote that the game, albeit flawed, is worth a look if you are into the setting and genre, although you're probably better off waiting for a discount. The other big reason to delay getting your hands on this game is that maybe, just maybe, the developers will be able to improve the optimization, which is currently dreadful on PC. Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 is powered by Unreal Engine 5. However, it is pretty basic in its feature set. There are no ray traced settings to enable, and the game as a whole is far from the best showcase of Epic's game-making technology. Even the texture work is not always great, and the open world of Seattle is quite small by current standards. Long story short, it's not doing anything special. Unfortunately, by now, we are used to reporting about Unreal Engine games having troubles with stuttering, but this is on another level entirely. As you can see in the gameplay video, the game stutters constantly while in the open world, whereas most titles that suffer from this issue only have that problem when loading another big chunk of the playable area. When you go inside interiors, the stuttering is slightly less prominent (but not at all gone). I used NVIDIA FrameView and FLAT to better analyze the very same open world gameplay segment seen in the footage. The results are frankly astounding, and not in a good way. As you can see from the frame time graph, we have an inexplicable peak of 175 milliseconds, but even taking that aside, many times during the custom benchmark the frame time spiked beyond 40ms, meaning the frame rate dropped to 25 frames per second. It may have been for just a moment, but that's what makes it jarring. The average frame rate is not at all a problem. With a Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPU and GeForce RTX 5090 GPU, settings set to Ultra, NVIDIA DLAA enabled and NVIDIA DLSS Multi Frame Generation set to 4x, the game averages 220 frames per second. The issue is that it constantly drops very low, then picks back up again, and so on and so forth, providing the opposite of a smooth experience. By the way, this isn't like the case of Dying Light: The Beast, where Techland later had to fix an issue with NVIDIA DLSS Frame Generation that caused undue stuttering. I actually played most of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 with Frame Generation turned off, simply because it couldn't really help at all with this game's stuttering, and the issue was still there. According to FLAT, the game was stuttering 20,29% of the entire time of the benchmark, which is by far the worst result I have ever seen. Usually, even the worst cases of stuttering reach around 9 or 10%. The analysis thus confirms the subjective experience: this is perhaps the worst example of stuttering seen in a long time in a PC game, and we've seen a lot in the past few years. As if that wasn't enough, like I mentioned in the full review, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 also completely lacks support for High Dynamic Range (HDR) displays. This is just outright unacceptable for a game of this caliber that launches in late 2025. The first triple-A games started implementing HDR eight years ago, and nowadays most displays support HDR. Besides, based on what developers tell me, it should be really easy to implement it via Unreal Engine. Unfortunately, I don't have much good news to share with regard to the technical side of this game. Like I said, we can only hope that some optimization fixes will be introduced with a patch, but I had already warned the development team after the preview build and there were pretty much no improvements from that build to the launch one. Maybe now they will take a closer look.
