The newly released Nivalis Nights, developed by ION LANDS and published by 505 Games, may have gone under the radar for many people given the big The Witcher 3 Remastered patch yesterday (which is facing its own performance criticisms), but the new cyberpunk-themed title has its own optimization worries, even on high-end hardware.

Even a positive review in which a user praises Nivalis Nights as “one of the coolest games I’ve ever seen” admits that the performance is “miserable” despite running it on an RTX 4090 & i9-12900KS combo. The developer’s response from 505 Games comes with a copy-and-paste statement that suggests restarting the game or switching your PC’s power mode.

Nivalis Nights performance issues are the game’s main downside

It’s worth pointing out that the game still holds a Mostly Positive review rating at the time of writing, but we notice that many of them touch on performance issues despite the final thumbs-up verdict. The developer says “frame rate can vary in areas with lots of NPCs,” but doesn’t really offer any proper solution outside of restarting the game or relying on a pretty basic power mode setting change.

Image source: Steam

Many players so far have mentioned Cyberpunk 2077 in their reviews so far, for good and bad reasons. Nivalis Nights’ atmosphere is being widely praised thanks to its cyberpunk setting, but it’s also being scorched for its performance. As seen in the review above, it reportedly runs worse than CP2077 on its top ‘Psycho’ ray-tracing setting.

“I actually have higher FPS in CP2077 with path tracing on than in this game when looking somewhere with more than 5 NPCs,” says one review, highlighting the issue mentioned by the developer in relation to the more NPC-heavy areas. That’s with an RTX 5070 GPU and 5700X3D CPU. For now, it seems players will simply have to wait for optimization updates.

Nivalis Nights is a completely different genre from CD Projekt Red’s ambitious ARPG. Instead, it’s a life simulator game with a more relaxing vibe to it. “It’s really scratched that Cyberpunk itch,” says one reviewer; “This is exactly the kind of cyberpunk game I have been waiting for,” says another. So while the gameplay and atmosphere are great, its performance leaves a lot to be desired.

About the Author

Jack Goodall

At PC Guide, Jack is mostly responsible for reporting on hardware deals. He also specializes in monitors, TVs, and headsets and can be found putting his findings together in a review or best-of guide.