Over three years after the original announcement, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is finally available on PC and consoles. You can read Wccftech's review on this page; I'll focus on the PC performance here.

　　Ever since Daedalic Entertainment released the official system requirements, gamers have been worried since they are some of the highest we've seen to date.

　　Unfortunately, after testing the review build of The Lord of the Rings: Gollum with the optimized Game Ready driver released by NVIDIA, I'd say at least most of those concerns were warranted.

　　First things first, though. The game is powered by Unreal Engine 4 and, unfortunately, it does have quite a bit of stuttering, mostly due to traversal (induced by movement between chunks of the locations), though I wouldn't be surprised if there was some shader stuttering as well. After all, the game does not explicitly mention performing any shader caching.

　　It's not the worst stuttering encountered in an Unreal Engine game (or in any game, for that matter), but it's there even when using DLSS 3 (Frame Generation).

　　In fact, while NVIDIA touted a nearly 4x performance uplift with DLSS technologies, most of that is probably due to DLSS 2 (Super Resolution). In my testing with an RTX 4090 GPU and i7-12700KF CPU, DLSS 3 only provided a 41% boost (from 82 to 116.1 frames per second) in average FPS, with 1% percentile and 0.2% percentile results registering similar boosts (42% and 43%, respectively) once Frame Generation was enabled.

　　It's far from the biggest performance uplift I've seen with DLSS 3. Of course, if you own a GeForce RTX 40 graphics card, you'll still want to activate it in The Lord of the Rings: Gollum to essentially get extra frame rate for free.

　　There doesn't seem to be any downside in activating DLSS 3 when it comes to visual artifacts. However, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum does suffer from slight ghosting caused by DLSS 2. It is especially noticeable around Gollum's head when turning around the camera quickly. It had been a while since I witnessed ghosting caused by NVIDIA's Deep Learning Super Sampling, and I hope it'll be fixed soon, though it is pretty much mandatory to use in this game if you want to get decent performance.

　　I tried switching DLSS 2 for DLAA. When using Frame Generation, the performance seemed to be similar to DLSS Super Resolution without FG, but then a more taxing area of the game temporarily tanked the frame rate to below 50 frames per second, which isn't smooth at all with FG since the real frame rate would be around 25 FPS.

　　One quick tip to improve your frame rate in The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is turning off ray tracing. It only affects shadows and reflections, and the visual boost is modest as you can see in the screenshots below, whereas the performance hit is over 30 FPS on an RTX 4090 GPU. It's simply not worth it. Moreover, stuttering is bound to decrease without ray tracing due to diminished strain on the CPU, as seen in many other games.

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　　Moreover, the visuals in general are a bit underwhelming, especially for the performance requirements. The Lord of the Rings: Gollum can look decent at times, but character models are rough, and the lighting is hardly impressive.

　　Overall, Daedalic Entertainment's game is not the worst PC port seen recently, but it's also far from a paragon of either visual or performance.