This guide will be helpful for anyone looking to improve the overall performance and stability of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, allowing you to run this game smoothly, stutter- and crash-free and hopefully resolve common issues caused by the way its game's engine operates* along the way. Despite Clair Obscur being a complex UE5 title, it is well-optimised and can run well on mid-end consumer hardware with balanced settings configuration.

*See chapters for optimisation tips if you are specifically looking to boost your in-game FPS. One of the goals of this guide is to keep your in-game fidelity up to par, while solving crashes, freezes and black screens during cutscenes and general gameplay.

https://psteamproxy.yuanyoumao.com/app/1903340
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a title running on Unreal Engine 5 and it introduces a lot of nuance when it comes to resource and power management. The guide will be updated if more solutions, specifically bound to this title, will be discovered in the future, further expanding its capacity.

The power of your mighty gaming machine to render absolute miracles on your screen in real-time should not be overlooked when it comes to the communication between your hardware components and the system itself. In order to maintain high levels of performance and general stability it is important to keep every piece of hardware up to date with most recent supported drivers. Or is it?

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I highly recommend to use Dispay Driver Uninstaller and perform a clean installation. Go through the process of DDU and clean install, if you want the best results, whether you are downgrading your drivers or moving up to a newer version instead. This will save you from a headache down the road. You can follow this tutorial:

Official NVIDIA drivers [www.nvidia.com]
The number of actually stable drivers shipped for Nvidia GPU's degrades each year. I will recommend against newer drivers and stick with older versions instead. I have personally tested Studio and Game-ready variants and encountered no issues with the following:

Official AMD drivers [www.amd.com]
If you are using AMD graphics card, you can find the latest driver on the official website. However, some advise against it and prefer a basic Windows drivers instead. It is up to you.

Intel drivers [www.intel.com] AMD drivers [www.amd.com]
A very crucial piece of software that will unlock the full potential of your processing power and fix potential stutters and glitches you may have witnessed in the game. Type in your CPU name and get the latest driver, recommended to install manually, without using the all-in-one utility provided by the manufacturer.

If you didn't check on your BIOS for a while, it might be worth considering, since such updates bring a lot to the table and can sometimes resolve all of the issues you previously had altogether. It doesn't work miracles, but it is still a worthy note for you to consider before moving on.

Peripheral devices drivers and software updates
This step is not mandatory, but highly advised. With multiple ongoing wired or wireless connections to your PC, it is only right to keep such devices up-to date with drivers as well.

Many stability-related problems can be caused by both undervolting and overclocking, especially noticeable when running UE5 games. In my experience, this is the main culprit when it comes to random or recurring crashes. The best way to fix it is to revert to factory settings, also known as optimised defaults in BIOS.

It can be frustrating to have fine-tuned your system to your personal preference, all to throw it all away in order to be able to play this game normally. You can pass all of the benchmarks with flying colors, but fail to get past a cutscece in this game. In case you are reverting an overclock, it will cost you some performance, which can be gained by using tips in other chapters. Each and every system will be different, I will list a couple of solutions for you to try first:

Disabling XMP/EXPO, allowing your ram sticks to run at factory settings, can solve the majority of instability issues. Try this before going through other steps and see how it does. Lowering XMP/EXPO profile base frequency by 200-600 MHz can also help, but it is not guaranteed to solve crashing in game, since memory timings and voltage in this case are still configured by the profile.
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If you are using MSI Afterburner, or any other third-party application for undervolting or overclocking - restore the default values for your graphics card by resetting it. Maximum temperature limit can still be adjusted, make sure to separate it from the power limit to avoid potential issues.

This doesn't apply to fan curves, if you would like to keep them intact. Simply enable Fan Sync profile.

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Disable Performance Boost Override and Curve Optimiser by setting it to Auto. Disable CPU Boost Clock Override, if you have manually offset CPU frequency values. Thermal throttle limit for you CPU will not affect the stability if you are to adjust it within the reasonable values.

For high-end CPU's that run at higher frequencies, if reverting back to stock values didn't resolve an issue with crashing under load, it may be beneficial to set a negative frequency offset of 50-200 MHz. Only try this if you still experience crashing after trying all of the methods, because you will lose performance. Applicable for both Intel and AMD chipsets.

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Instead of tinkering with values in BIOS you can make changes to the power management inside Windows itself. Navigate to search and type "Power", select "Edit power plan". Inside of control panel, select "Change advanced power settings", locate "Processor power management" in a new window and set minimum and maximum percentage values to 5% and 99% respectfully. 1% minimum and values above 95% are safe to experiment with, there is no noticeable performance drop.
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Best image quality and performance achieved on Nvidia RTX cards, works on many RTX 20/30/40/50 series. AI-powered temporal upscaling with support for frame generation (best results on 40- and 50-series cards). To run without upscaling, set quality to native DLAA.

Modern DLSS uses motion vectors, depth and history buffers alongside a neural network to reconstruct a higher-resolution image from lower-resolution renders. A recently added layer of Frame Generation interpolates extra frames to multiply perceived FPS at the cost of input latency. Using Frame Generation technology at 4x will cause noticeable blur and ghosting (interpolation artifacts).

Works on Intel with XMX best performance. Intel’s machine-learning upscaler, supports both XMX-accelerated execution on Intel GPUs and a DP4a fallback for other GPUs (slower and less efficient compute shader fallback).

Unreal Engine’s built-in temporal upscaler (platform-agnostic). It’s an engine-integrated temporal upscaler that uses motion vectors and history buffers to get high-quality images from lower internal renders. No vendor-specific cores required to run, but is much less efficient, might be a good choice for low-end GPUs.

If you want native-resolution rendering and only need Anti-Aliasing, no upscaling. TAA is useful if you prefer exact native fidelity over the sharpening and processing introduced by AI upscalers, but it cost you FPS, a lot.

By default, the game runs a benchmark at startup and sets optimised settings for you. This may be a good starting point, but you can always optimize and tweak each parameter individually in order to achieve the best results.

The following comparison is for a specific graphics setting only and performance changes that can be seen are only related to the parameter in question. Every other setting remains the same (High preset) for the whole duration of benchmarking. All testing was done in native 1440p using DLSS DLAA, running on stock Nvidia RTX 4070FE and Ryzen 9 7900 with a thermal limit of 80°C.

Skip this chapter if you intend to run the game on Low Preset due to hardware limitations.

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Anti-Aliasing smooths jagged edges, leave at Medium. Its behaviour changes based on Scaling type chosen, so the impact on performance and overall results will vary depending on which option you are going for. DLSS and XeSS have their own AA solution.

Each preset (Epic/High/Medium) looks nearly identical, with Low setting in particular introducing visible noise in foliage. By default the game is very sharp, using higher presets for anti-aliasing can smooth out the edges more and help with distant visual artefacts, but it will inevitably make the entire image more blurry as a result.

Using Unreal's TSR and setting Anti-Aliasing to Epic can sharpen the image more but it will cost you significant FPS loss as a result. I would recommend avoiding it unless you are running very high-end GPU. See modding section below for a better sharpening solution for consumer-grade hardware.

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Shadow rendering is GPU-intensive (and sometimes CPU-bound for shadow cascades), so dropping this setting often yields big FPS gains.

Setting shadows to Low will cause visible jagged edges, Medium setting fixes it and introduces clear and sharp edges on all object shadows. High has a softer, more natural spread of light and shadow on all surfaces.I would advise against going Epic for the most players.
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Global Illumination, or GI, will affect how object in a scene are lit by the sources of light and how light interacts with these surfaces, the quality in this case indicates how scenes are lit by bounced light. This is a very demanding setting, but it also has the most visible changes to all in-game areas, both enclosed and open world, so tuning it can meaningfully affect performance.
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Setting GI too low will cause flickering on distant objects, even if they are in a clear view of the camera, centered on the screen. Epic setting resolves all of these issues, but can introduce unnaturally lit spaces with low-intensity shadows.
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Lumen reflections, utilized in Unreal Engine 5, use roughness maps to save performance by rendering less surfaces based on object edges. The quality slider will affect the size of puddles on the ground, as well as the overall image sharpness found in these reflections. Medium setting is well-balanced in all of the aspects, moving up to High and Epic will only slightly affect the reflection quality.
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Toggles effects like bloom, depth-of-field, motion blur, and film grain. Low affect on performance, personal preference. Setting it to Low might cause weird rendering issues in cutscenes.

You are allowed to control motion blur, film grain, chromatic aberration and vignette independently. Disable them for a responsive experience, keep them enabled for an atmosphere and cinematic looks.

Medium post-process keeps cinematic effects; Low removes blur/glow and slightly speeds up rendering. High and Epic presets introduce effects that can blur out part of the image. If you like to take sharp and clear screenshots, experiment with this setting, but Medium is the most optimal.
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Depending on the amount of VRAM you have currently available on your GPU, it will affect the settings you can comfortably choose when it comes into texture quality. Higher settings on mid-end graphics card with less than 8GB will cause missing or slow loading of textures and swapping, especially noticeable during cutscenes. Follow the chart below and test with your hardware in game:
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Visual Effects covers particles, shaders for magic, and environment effects.It will introduce more complex and detailed particle animations, especially noticeable in battles: when using character abilities, regular attacks and more. Great for immersion and the scaling of visual complexity is worth a little trade-off in performance in my opinion.
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It drastically affects the rendering of vegetation density and detail. Of all settings, foliage often gives one of the best performance boosts for visual sacrifice. Reducing foliage can give noticeable FPS gains in forested or grassy areas, the only trade-off being the immersion, since overall saturation of vegetation is greatly impacted at each setting step.
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Controls material complexity and shading realism on in-game models, however, it’s the least critical setting to change and control. Strive for higher presets for consistent lighting on characters and surfaces, since the impact on performance is negligible.

High setting will allow for more natural rendering of hair materials, with proper reflections and clear density, as well as enhance other in-game surfaces.Medium is great balance between performance and visual quality.

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Transformer-based AI models for Super Resolution, Ray Reconstruction, and DLAA — these generally give cleaner details, improved temporal stability (less ghosting) and better motion-detail retention than the older CNN models. Expect improved motion detail and fewer ghosting artifacts in pans and visual effects.

Multi-Frame Generation on RTX 50-series hardware is huge potential FPS multiplication, but hardware-limited, since earlier cards get model improvements and updated Frame Generation models, not necessarily full MFG.

Improved frame pacing and lower VRAM cost in the transformer models and updated Frame Generation implementation that can reduce memory pressure and occasionally improve performance.

Keep in mind that future game or driver updates can break the swap. Try it only if you’re comfortable restoring the original version if it comes down to it! Some scenes may show new artifacts or regressions depending on how the game integrates DLSS and engine-side motion vectors/depth handling.

• DLSS Swapper replaces DLSS DLLs in the game folder. That can cause crashes, render errors or visual glitches if the game expects the older model and API surface. Always back up originals.
  
  
• A game patch can overwrite DLSS DLLs or change file layout, breaking your swap and requiring reapplication or revert. You’ll need to re-verify or reapply after updates.
  
  
• Odd edge cases, for example, user interface glitching, stereoscopic issues and ray-tracing interactions can appear and you may be on your own to resolve it, since DLSS-4 models are not certified to be used for this game yet.

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Navigate to github and download the latest version of DLSS Swapper tool via link:
https://github.com/beeradmoore/dlss-swapper/releases

You can also use winget instead:

winget install --id=beeradmoore.dlss-swapper -e

Use DLSS Swapper’s backup feature or manually copy the original DLSS DLLs out of the game folder. Don’t proceed without a tested restore method.

Locally download .zip for a DLSS version you are willing to upgrade to using DLSS Swapper. For a quick install, you can assign it directly inside the program, but for a consistent and reliable outcome I would suggest to follow the steps below for a manual installation.

Navigate to game's directory using Steam "locate game files" feature in properties and follow this exact path to a nvngx_dlss.dll:

Expedition 33\Sandfall\Plugins\NVIDIA\DLSS\Binaries\ThirdParty\Win64

Replace present DLSS DLLs with a new version acquired through a DLSS Swapper tool earlier.

Navigate to your local game directory and backup the 'Sandfall_PCD3D_SM6.upipelinecache' file. Delete it afterwards. You can quickly access the right folder in file explorer using this universal path:

%localappdata%\Sandfall\Saved

Create a New Text Document and rename it to Sandfall_PCD3D_SM6.upipelinecache, make sure, that the .txt format is replaced in the process. Set file properties to "Read only". This will allow to allocate new shader cache.

DLSS Preset K is the latest, improved version of the NVIDIA DLSS transformer model for DLSS Super Resolution. You can enable it using Nvidia App (Geforce Experience) by configuring DLSS Override preset, instead of it defaulting to using 3d-application settings. It can also be done using NVPI.

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It occurs on startup and in-game, either during gameplay or cutscenes, and there are multiple solutions to dealing with it once and for all. The first logical step is to go through the driver cleanup with DDU and their respectful updates, since this is a crucial bridge of communication between game's engine and your hardware. Below you will find a list of solutions that can prevent this error from happening if driver updates didn't really help:

Running the game exclusively in Borderless Windows is a first step in resolving LowLevel Fatal Error. It's worth trying as a troubleshooting step, especially if the crash is related to fullscreen optimisations or switching between applications. If the game crashes on start and you can't make it to the menu to change the resolution, enable this setting via Steam command line:

-screen-width 1920 -screen-height 1080 -screen-fullscreen 0 -popupwindow

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You can limit the amount of frames rendered though an in-game cap or by using G-SYNC or FreeSync. By doing so, you are providing headroom for your GPU to handle demanding scenes, reducing heat and power consumption. Generally, it results in a more consistent experience, since you are no longer relying on a fluctuating FPS. Aim for the number you will feel comfortable with.

Do some benchmarking in-game before relying on a base refresh rate of your monitor, since it will paint a much cleaner picture for you to analyze and adjust this setting accordingly. 30 FPS is a great cap for low-end systems, 60 FPS for mid- and 120 FPS for high-end. If you machine can handle it - go higher than 120 FPS, especially beneficial for high refresh rate monitor setups.

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Not an immediate culprit to crashes, but can be an underlying cause, due to contributing to an increased system load. Enabling VSync and a low-latency mode simultaneously can also cause issues specifically bound to UE5 titles.

This type of Fatal Error is usually caused by pushing your hardware beyond its stable limits, leading to instability and overheating. Running a preset that your system can't manage under load is a clear indication to lower demanding quality settings, i.e. texture quality, foliage, shadows and global illumination. With clever fine-tuning you can achieve similar quality results for less.

Higher presets will demand more from your GPU and some rely solely on VRAM, when such capabilities are exceeded beyond limits - your system becomes unstable and crashes. Heat generation during load should also not be overlooked, make sure all of your key components are properly controlled thermal-wise via fans and pumps.
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For the most part, GPU becomes the primary bottleneck, however, excessively high settings can also max out the CPU, causing it to become unresponsive resulting in a crash.

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By default the game utilizes DirectX12 and it is fairly well implemented and optimized. Forcing an older version on load can minimize shader compile stuttering for lower-end systems, but will cause missing textures! Newer hardware will always benefit from running DirectX12 and I will recommend against messing around with it, unless you really find it necessary.

Please note, that DirectX 12 is a newer, more efficient API that allows for better utilization of multi-core CPUs and more direct communication between the CPU and GPU. Switching to DirectX 11 can cause you to loose performance in exchange for more stability. Navigate to game options in Steam library and input the following command in launch options to affect the startup:

-d3d11

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All overlays can cause performance issues. Disabling the Steam overlay can resolve fatal error crashes by eliminating conflicts between the overlay's functions and the game itself. This is a very rare case for a crash, but still worth mentioning as a potential fix.

Note that you will no longer receive toast notifications while in game. Disabling the overlay prevents you from accessing Steam-related features like chat, friends lists, achievements, and the in-game browser while a game is running.

This chapter is dedicated specifically for systems that are struggling to maintain consistent level of performance and run into issue during heavy loads, this information is intended for low-end and mid-end systems.

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Self-explanatory.
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If you are running the game in windowed or borderless window mode, enabling this feature will allow for smoother experience by resolving the latency issue.

Additionally, disable fullsceen optimizations and set High DPI scaling override to Application.

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To get the most performance available out of your system, disable any power-preserving capabilities to allow your components to work comfortably under the load.

The game is new, as of writing this guide, and update support for it will continue for quite a while, before it reaches the final patch. Until then, some modifications can either break it or fix. In this chapter I will only mention the most useful and stable mods, which can help you regain some of the performance and allow for better and more enjoyable experience overall.

The mods listed do not require you to override existing game files, their installation is separate and they can be removed at any point manually or using a mod manager of your choice.

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Original Nexus page for this mod [www.nexusmods.com]
An ASI plugin for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 that removes the 30fps cap in cutscenes, fixes ultrawide issues and more. Visit the original mod page for download and additional information.
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This mod can cause a rendering issue, when changing graphics setting while in game. Reloading a save or restarting the game can help to resolve it.

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Original Nexus page for this mod [www.nexusmods.com]
A proper solution to mitigate stuttering and performance issues. It optimizes CPU and GPU efficiency, reduces latency, and improves streaming and memory management - all without sacrificing the game's graphics/visual quality.
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If you have a modding suggestion, that can also improve the experience of others, feel free to share it in the comments below. I will do my best to list them in this guide as well if I find them useful.

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If you will decide to use mods in your play-through, be aware of potential future patches that may temporarily break their support, rendering them unavailable.

Modding is enhancement to your experience, a work of other community members dedicated to their craft and willing to help others achieve their desired performance and gaming experience. Show some love to the original creators and feel free to mark this guide useful if your issues were resolved as well.