Biomutant PC Performance Overview

It’s always a lovely time when a new game comes out and it is rife with original and creative ideas. Biomutant is one such case and it has captured the hearts of many Navy TEALs here at WellPlayed, and while not all of its ideas may have panned out exactly how the development team may have wanted, we at least get to have a look at how this relatively small group of people handled developing the creative and beautiful new open-world RPG using Unreal Engine 4. So, let’s dive in!

Graphics options

With those settings listed you can clearly see that the people at Experiment 101 took their time allowing for PC players to have a fully-fledged experience. As with a lot of other Unreal Engine games, these visuals settings are a law of diminishing returns, so it’s definitely recommended to run a mix of medium-high settings, with post-processing and effects being the two settings that will cause the biggest differences in performance.

Now onto the actual performance numbers. I scripted my own benchmark which took a very particular path through some of the game’s map. It’s not a perfect solution, but given the lack of any present benchmark within the game itself, it will at least give you a rough idea of how the game will perform.

Biomutant Benchmark Results (Max Settings)

For the most part, Biomutant actually performs quite well. For a game world on such a large scale as this, it’s expected for areas that capitalise on large draw distances to suffer some performance hits and even with that, the game is quite stable. Where the performance anomalies lie, surprisingly, is when the game is rendering at ultrawide resolutions. Looking at the performance charts, you can clearly see that the game takes a notable hit to its performance when either 2560×1080 and 3440×1440 resolutions are in use. The average framerates take your average declining trend, but where it really surprises me is in the 99th percentiles. Usually, if a game supports ultrawide, the 99th percentile will follow the standard performance trends of the game, but Biomutant really does not like these resolutions. 4K aside, the lowest 99th percentiles here were for both the ultrawide resolutions, and when it came to capturing all the frame data for the benchmark, the game really did not like starting the program for this at 3440×1440, to the point where the game would majorly hitch when the recording started.

As mentioned before, effects will really take the framerate down a peg so I highly recommend turning these down a bit to conserve some of your performance. Another thing to note, for those of you who like to use DSR (Dynamic Super Resolution), don’t use it for Biomutant – whenever a save file is loaded, the game will revert your display resolution to the default resolution of your monitor, so instances where you are stuck on a boss or a puzzle or just reload your save for anything else, you will need to set your resolution every time.

Overall however, Biomutant appears to offer a stable, consistent experience for PC players while allowing for your standard level of customisation in the game’s settings. This is without even noting the fact that Unreal Engine makes modifying the hidden settings incredibly easy through the game’s .ini files. Experiment 101 has done a fairly solid job here from a technical standpoint, due in part to the flexibility and ease of use that the Unreal Engine affords developers, but also due to the diligence from the developers themselves. It definitely isn’t perfect, and while there are a few blemishes for ultrawide users, the percentage of people that actually run ultrawide is fairly small and it’s nice to see a small developer even considering ultrawide when some large AAA developers forget it exists.