This is just a short guide to help people fix potential stutter issues within Ni no Kuni.
Potential Fixes
When I first picked up this game on PC, I noticed really early on that it suffers from some fairly frequent stuttering issues. The game plays at 60 FPS most of the time, but every 20 or 30 seconds the game would hitch and stutter.
I started doing some reading up, and I’ve seen suggestions that it’s anything from assets loading as you move around the world, to being installed on a mechanical HDD as opposed to an SSD, to frame pacing issues.
After a lot of trial and error, I finally got the game to stop stuttering every 20 or 30 seconds on both SSD and HDD. The only time I see any stutter or slowdown now is during combat with bosses, when they’re knocked down for a “CHANCE” attack. This issue occurs on both PC and PS4 Pro, so I assume it’s engine related.
So here are some of the steps to try, or combine them all – which is what I’ve done.
First: Go to the game folder and right click on “NinoKuni_WotWW_Remastered.exe”, and click Properties. From there, click “Compatibility” and check “Disable fullscreen optimizations”. With this option enabled, open “Change high DPI settings” and click “Override high DPI scaling behavior”. Under this option, set the behavior to “Application”. When you run the game, be sure to set the resolution to Fullscreen and not Borderless Windowed, as Borderless Windowed will cause the game to run even worse than it did before making these changes.
This step has been known to fix the stuttering issue for some players. If after doing this you still have issues with stuttering, also do the following:
Second: In the game’s graphic settings, turn off VSYNC and set the frame rate to 60.
Third: To prevent vertical tearing, either use your video driver’s control panel or NVIDIA Profile Inspector force VSYNC on for Ni no Kuni. Your video card’s VSYNC will work more reliably and cause fewer issues than using in game VSYNC (this is true of most games).
Fourth: Go into your antivirus software of choice and make sure that real time virus scanning is deactivated for the folder in which Ni no Kuni is installed. Some people have reported that this helps the game suffer from fewer hitches, due to the files not being accessed by your antivirus software all the time.
After combining all of these tweaks, I’ve had no more issues with the game stuttering. Doesn’t stutter on the world map, doesn’t stutter in town, doesn’t stutter in combat. Some of the hand drawn cut scenes seem a bit frame-y, but I think that’s a side effect of them being pre-rendered at either 24 or 30 fps (given the tradition animation style, I suspect they were animated at 24). This is an issue with a lot of pre-rendered cut scenes in PC games.
I hope this helps you, as these steps have really helped me.
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