Dauntless is a third-person action RPG game developed by Phoenix Labs and published by Epic Games. It is completely free-to-play and can be downloaded for free via the Epic Launcher.
You get to play as Slayers and the main objective is hunting Behemoths. By slaying these behemoths you get loot that can be used to craft and upgrade weapons and equipment that will make you even more powerful so that you can take down larger and more powerful Behemoths. The game can be played both as single-player or cooperatively with up to four people.
Though Dauntless is pretty well optimized for the most part, players are still experiencing minor issues here and there. So far the performance issues that players are experiencing in Dauntless are lag, fps drops, random freezes and micro stutters. Fortunately, all these performance issues are nothing serious and can be easily fixed with few tweaks here and there. Here is how to fix lag, fps drops, crashes and stuttering in Dauntless:
How to fix lag, fps drops, freezes and stutters in Dauntless
Check the system requirements of Dauntless
Make sure that your PC specifications at least matches the minimum system requirements of Dauntless. You don’t want to download a game just to find out that your hardware isn’t capable enough. People might think that just because Dauntless is a free-to-play title, it might be fairly easy to run. But that is completely wrong. Dauntless features some rich textures and overall graphics so you need some decent hardware to play it. Here are the system requirements for Dauntless:
Dauntless minimum system requirements
- GPU: nVidia 660Ti (DX11) or AMD RX 460 or equivalent
- CPU: i5 SandyBridge or AMD Ryzen 3 1200
- RAM: 4GB
- OS: Windows 7 DX11 Support
- Hard drive: 15GB of storage space
Dauntless recommended system requirements
- GPU: nVidia GTX 970 (DX11) or AMD RX 570 or equivalent
- CPU: i7 Haswell or AMD Ryzen 5 1600
- RAM: 8GB
- OS: Windows 10
- Hard drive: 15GB of storage space
Here is something you should know. Jordan from Dauntless support has mentioned, ‘While Dauntless may run on lower system specs, we can’t guarantee its performance‘.
[Note: The officially listed system requirements didn’t have any AMD CPU or GPU mentioned on them so we decided to add the names of processors and graphics cards from AMD as well, having similar performance]
Update your graphics driver
Though there hasn’t been any graphics driver specifically optimized for Dauntless by Nvidia or AMD, It is always recommended that you keep your drivers up-to-date. You wouldn’t want an outdated driver causing performance issues in games. Here are the links to the latest drivers for AMD and Nvidia graphics cards:
Nvidia Control Panel
[Note: This is for Nvidia users only]
- Open Nvidia Control Panel
- Click on Manage 3D settings on the left bar
- Click on the Program Settings tab
- Locate Dauntless from the drop down menu under “Select a program to customize”
- If you cannot find it on the list then click on the Add button and another list will appear
- If you still don’t see Dauntless then you need to add the .exe file manually. Just click on Browse
- Locate the folder where you have installed the game
- Select the executable file or the .exe file which in this case should be Dauntless.exe
- Once added the program settings will now be available for the game
- Now make the following changes:
Monitor Technology : G-Snyc (if available)
Maximum pre-rendered frames : 2
Threaded Optimization : On
Power Management : Prefer Maximum Performance
Texture filtering – Quality : Performance
Best Video or graphics settings for Dauntless
So we went ahead and ran Dauntless on a very basic and mediocre gaming PC. Here are the full specifications of our rig:
- CPU : Intel i3 8100
- GPU : MSI GTX 1050 ti 4GB
- RAM : 16GB DDR4 2400mhz
- HDD : 1 TB 7200 rpm
- SSD : 128 GB
Here are the graphics or video settings that we are think would be best for low and medium end PCs:
Go to Options > Video
Video : Fullscreen
Quality Scale : Slider at middle
Motion Blur : Slider at 20%
FOV : Slider at middle
V-sync : Off
Advanced Options
View Distance : High
Anti-Aliasing : Low
Shadows : Low
Post Effects : Med
Textures : Med
Special Effects : Med
Update Windows
We are not sure whether Dauntless has been affected in any way by buggy Windows updates or not but it is better to keep things updated so that yo do not run into problems later. Your present windows version or build might be slowing your system down without you having any idea about it. So check whether you have Windows updates available or not. Here is how you can update your Windows:
- Go to Settings
- Go to Update & Security
- Click on Check for updates
- Wait for the updates to get installed
- Restart your PC
Increase the Priority of Dauntless from the Task Manager
Since Dauntless is not a PvP or competitive game it does not have any anti-cheat.
- Launch Dauntless via Epic Launcher
- Press Alt+Tab to minimize the game
- Open Task Manager
- Click on Details tab
- Search for the process called Dauntless-Win64-Shipping.exe from the list
- Right click on the process and Set Priority to High
- Click on the View tab on your Task Manager
- Change Update Speed to High
Close overclocking applications
If by any chance you are experiencing micro stutters in Dauntless or the game is crashing for you, check whether any overclocking utility or application is running in the background or not. Overclocking applications like the MSI Afterburner and Zotac Firestorm are causing performance issues in a lot of games. So try to avoid CPU or GPU overclocking.
[Note: All the methods listed above are basic troubleshooting methods. Some may work for you and some may not. We have not included any advanced method because we do not want people to mess with the in-game files as it might cause the game to break down completely]
You are good to go!
That’s all, folks!
Last Updated on March 17, 2024
Shoaib, 30, is a simple guy who loves to play video games, and enjoys new cuisines sporadically. He has been gaming since he was 7 years old, and with an experience of 22 years, under his belt, there is not a single AAA game in this world, that he hasn’t played. Despite being a MBA Graduate he decided to follow his passion. And because of his love for gaming, Frondtech came into existence.