The turn-based tactical RPG Marvel’s Midnight Suns from XCOM creator Firaxis Games performs significantly better when not played through 2K’s launcher. Flickers largely disappear and the number of frames per second increases dramatically.
Hardware editor James Archer of PC games website Rock Paper Shotgun say that according to him this launcher is the cause of the stuttering and rather unstable performance. After disabling 2K’s launcher from playing the game and using Steam instead, the average frame rate improved by 62 percent.
He tested performance with 2K’s launcher and Steam during the tutorial mission. On a PC with an Intel i9-10900K processor, an RTX 3090 video card, 32GB of DDR4 memory and playing at a resolution of 2560×1440 pixels, it achieved an average frame rate of 90fps with a minimum of 46fps and a maximum of 111fps. When the same mission was played through Steam, the average frame rate was 146fps with a minimum of 66fps and a maximum of 190fps.
2K’s launcher starts automatically when players try to launch the game. Disabling it isn’t as simple as unchecking it, which makes it clear that publisher Take-Two likes players to use this software as part of the game’s startup. Archer has written out a relatively simple step-by-step plan for bypassing the launcher, which in short boils down to entering the file location of a specific exe file in Steam.