Bandai Namco has just released The Blood of Dawnwalker, which uses Unreal Engine 5. However, it appears that the game suffers from major stuttering issues right now. Not only that, but there is an awful 30FPS cap for its cinematic cutscenes.
To test the game, I used an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 32GB of DDR5 at 6000Mhz, and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090. I also used Windows 10 64-bit and the GeForce 616.64 driver.
The game starts with an awful 30FPS capped cinematic. I really don’t know why the devs have locked the cutscenes on PC. It doesn’t make sense, especially for a 2026 game.
What’s funny here is that some cutscenes run with an unlocked framerate. Those cutscenes are the ones in which players have to make decisions. All the other cutscenes are locked at 30FPS. This can make the game feel disorienting. So, I really hope the devs will unlock them via a future update. That, or we’ll have to wait for a modder to save the day.
The Prologue area runs without any hitches, which is a good first impression. However, once it ends and you enter the village, all hell breaks loose. The game stutters whenever you turn the camera. These are not traversal stutters. They happen every time you move the camera. Since this is a third-person action RPG, you will constantly have stutters and frame pacing issues.
Here’s a screenshot in which the frametime graph clearly shows these stutters and frame pacing issues. This is a mess, and the devs will have to do something to fix them. These stutters can literally ruin your gaming experience.
The Blood of Dawnwalker uses Unreal Engine 5’s Lumen. As such, it’s quite demanding, especially on Ultra Settings. At Native 4K/Ultra Settings, it ran at 45-50FPS in the first village. By using DLSS Quality, I was able to stay above 60FPS at all times. I wasn’t expecting the game to run great at Native 4K with Lumen. However, for a UE5 game, The Blood of Dawnwalker does not look that impressive.
Anyway, since a lot of people were hyped for it, I wanted to let you know about its stuttering issues. This game came out too soon. It needed more time in the oven. It has major tech issues that the devs should have fixed before release.
Our PC Performance Analysis for this game will go live later this week. In that article, I’ll be testing numerous AMD and NVIDIA GPUs. So, stay tuned for more!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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