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Disastrous MindsEye launch plagued by performance issues — even an RTX 5090 can't deliver 60 fps despite 19GB VRAM usage, developer working on a fix

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No, your high-end system is not enough to play this game.

MindsEye gameplay screenshot on Steam
(Image credit: Build a Rocket Boy / Steam)

Third-person action-adventure title MindsEye had a disastrous launch after many day-one players complained of performance issues despite driving top-of-the-line equipment. One creator shared on X (formerly Twitter) that they have an average frames per second (fps) of just 55, despite running an RTX 5090 paired with an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D and 64 GB of DDR5. The screenshot shows the game's 98% GPU usage and gobbles up 19 GB of VRAM. It comes after the game was universally panned on launch for its unfinished state, with players reporting wild glitches and strange NPC behavior.

One player running a more modest system—an RX 9070 XT GPU matched to a 9800X3D processor—tried the game set to the lowest possible quality. They were able to achieve a more respectable 84 fps, but they had atrocious 21 fps 1% lows and 16 fps 0.1% lows.

These absolutely horrendous numbers make the game quite unplayable on most gaming PCs, and it’s quite reminiscent of Cyberpunk 2077, which ran into the same problems when it launched five years ago. One might argue that the developers would’ve warned the players about the hardware requirements for MindsEye, but the Steam page says otherwise.

The game’s minimum requirements are an Intel Core i5-12400F or an AMD Ryzen 5 5600X matched to a GPU with 6 GB of VRAM, like RTX 2060 or RX 5600 XT, and 16 GB of RAM. If you want a better experience, its recommended specifications are an Intel Core i7-13700K or AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D with a GPU like the RTX 4070 or RX 6800 XT. However, the samples we’ve seen show that these specifications are largely unable to run the game at good quality with acceptable fps numbers.

GameGPU.com tested the game at maximum quality and no upscaling across different GPUs with a 9800X3D CPU, and the results showed that you need at least an RX9070 with 16 GB of VRAM to hit more than 60 fps at 1920 x 1080 resolution. If you want to play at 1440p, only the RTX 4090 24 GB and RTX 5090 32 GB can go above that number, while no GPU achieves more than 60 fps at 4K resolution.

The suggested minimum and recommended GPUs for the game aren’t even listed in the test, as they only have 6 GB or 8 GB of VRAM, whereas the least powerful tested GPU was the RTX 2080 Ti, which has 11 GB of VRAM. Despite being locked to 30 fps, console players are also reportedly experiencing stutter issues.

Thankfully, the developers have already released a statement on Steam acknowledging the issue and said that they’re working on a hotfix for the game. “Improving performance across all devices is our immediate focus,” the team said. “A patch that begins our commitment to address this is scheduled for the end of this week on PC, which will also roll out to consoles as soon as possible.”

This is a comforting thought for the players who have invested at least $60 to buy the game, only to find it unplayable on their systems. Hopefully, the team irons out these kinks and gets the game playing as smoothly as possible on the greatest number of systems.

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Jowi Morales
Jowi Morales
Contributing Writer

Jowi Morales is a tech enthusiast with years of experience working in the industry. He’s been writing with several tech publications since 2021, where he’s been interested in tech hardware and consumer electronics.

11 Comments Comment from the forums
  • watzupken
    “Acknowledge this issue and will fix it”. In actual fact, they already knew the issues but not fixing it on time. How can they not figure these glaring issues out before launch? Sub 60 FPS with RTX 5090, who are they selling this game to?

    The extreme poor state of the game demonstrates that the company never bothered about their customers. If you are customer centric, you will never offer a product that is so unpolished.
    Reply
  • valthuer
    Ever since devs started to rely on upscaling, unoptimised messes have become the norm, so i don't believe we 'll find many gamers surprised by this situation.

    These days, it's gonna be a piece of news worth reading when a game is actually optimised.
    Reply
  • Hooda Thunkett
    This is going to be the norm until the customers demand otherwise.
    Basically, a game developer is going to have to go under because they delivered a severely subpar experience on launch before other developers start to optimize their games before launch.
    Reply
  • helper800
    Just to be clear here, no game studio wants to release a game in such a state if they don't have to. The pressure to release is insane from producers and all they want is their money back from investment and care very little about performance issues, bugs, bad AI, et cetera. Producers almost always have the last say when a game is released. Look to the publishers for blame, not the dev studios. That is the first game they have published and they used to be owned by EA for a number of years until they bought themselves out.
    Reply
  • retro77
    "Will it play MindsEye?" should be the new meme and bar for all performance reviews.
    Reply
  • razor512
    Please do some performance testing with the RTX 5060 8GB. :)
    Reply
  • Loadedaxe
    This is what happens when non devs run the show for release. The devs most likely said "its not ready" and the publisher said..."nope, release it, we will iron the bugs and optimize it later"

    $$$$$ is all that matters!
    Reply
  • WestCoastLifer
    You know GPU manufacturers have been the sineater of late but developers definitely have to answer for crap like this.

    Shameful.
    Reply
  • uplink-svk
    helper800 said:
    Just to be clear here, no game studio wants to release a game in such a state if they don't have to. The pressure to release is insane from producers and all they want is their money back from investment and care very little about performance issues, bugs, bad AI, et cetera. Producers almost always have the last say when a game is released. Look to the publishers for blame, not the dev studios. That is the first game they have published and they used to be owned by EA for a number of years until they bought themselves out.
    This and pretty much nothing else. Products are being made for share/🥩holders, NOT for the actual consumer/end-user, these only deliver the money. What a crazy age we live in...
    Reply
  • thesyndrome
    Loadedaxe said:
    This is what happens when non devs run the show for release. The devs most likely said "its not ready" and the publisher said..."nope, release it, we will iron the bugs and optimize it later"

    $$$$$ is all that matters!
    The thing is that this is being published by IO Interactive.....who are the DEVELOPERS behind Hitman, so they should know about the pitfalls of releasing an unfinished game.

    Either IO have completely lost the plot and are as bad as the publishers they escaped from, or we need to consider the possibility that Build a Rocket Boy are the ones at fault and that the game would still be a mess even if they were given another 6 months (which didn't seem like a likely scenario considering the 'anticipation' for this game could be described as 'tepid' at best).
    As much as I think big publishers are a plague, not every dev team is an innocent victim of circumstance, sometimes poor hiring, quality control, or mismanagement are something the devs themselves are responsible for.
    Reply