The Ascent, the new top-down action RPG developed by Neon Giant, has finally released today, but some players are apparently reporting a stuttering issue in the game. If you play the game with DirectX12, you might be having this issue, but this Steam thread has a fix for stuttering in The Ascent.
The fix was originally used for Control when that game came out on PC and had a number of stuttering issues, but it also appears to work with The Ascent. In order to implement the fix, follow this guide.
- Click on the Windows Start Menu, search for Exploit Protection and open it.
- In the new window click on the Program Settings tab
- Click + Add Program to Customize
- Select Exact File Path
- Navigate to \steamapps\common\The Ascent\TheAscent\Binaries\Win64\ and select TheAscent-Win64-Shipping.exe
- In the window that appears scroll down to Control Flow Guard
- Check in Override System Settings, turn the setting off, then click Apply
Neon Giant has, thankfully, noticed the problems with stuttering in The Ascent, and is currently working on a solution. According to them, the reason the game is stuttering is due to the game caching shaders, which it does the first time something happens (so restarting it won’t help). Once the graphics are cached it should run normally otherwise.
Another option you could pick to hopefully work out the stuttering is changing the game from DX12 to DX11, especially given the Steam-provided fix only makes mention of DX12. Of course, there’s no guarantee that only doing that would solve the problem either.
The fix spoke about at the start of this article works for an RTX 3080, so hopefully anything below it would still be able to do the same. Otherwise, hopefully Neon Giant will be able to fix the bug that causes stuttering in The Ascent and fans will be able to play the game on PC properly.
You can pick up The Ascent on PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X today.