Install the game on an SSD or NVMe drive for area changes without stutters.
🚀 Higher, Steadier FPS
• Optimized build: the game exe is now compiled with ThinLTO and profile-guided optimization (PGO), trained on the open world. Same code, faster: in the user's test it matches or beats Oussama268's fork, which already used this build.
• Dynamic FPS (on by default in the 60 FPS mode): when the game drops below 50 FPS for 1.5 s, the limit locks to a steady step that suits your screen (48 FPS at 144 Hz, 40 at 120 Hz, 30 at 60 Hz) instead of swinging up and down; it goes back to 60 as soon as the game can keep it. Game logic follows real time, so nothing runs in slow motion. In the test: 57 FPS average per minute, back at 60 almost all the time. A box in the Play page's quick settings turns it off.
• Oussama268's 0.72.1-opt13 merged: far less stutter while riding, temporary render targets reused in heavy colossus fights, a freeze and black textures fixed, less input delay at 30 FPS, automatic retry on launch error 487, DLAA in the launcher.
🖼️ Extreme Mode Sharp Again
• v0.72.2 had put High and Maximum textures back at mip 2, which left the Extreme mode blurry. Maximum is back at mip 0 and High at mip 1 (cards under 8 GB keep the light profile), without the settings that used to copy up to 1.1 GB of textures in one frame at the forest entrance.
🛡️ Stability
• Ending fixed: the heap guard's two shortcuts, turned back on in 0.72, spoilt the game's memory at the end of the game (crashes on the "End" screen, when skipping the intro, between the ending and the title). They are off again; the ending and the intro skip now go through with nothing to repair.
• Time Attack mosaic fixed: the ending's texture protection kept old textures where an arena loads new ones. A load now releases it.
• Frozen picture fixed: the compute queue could get stuck on an endless write while the FPS counter kept running.
• Crash 0x564d24 fixed (the most frequent one, 30–40 s after loading a save), plus safety nets for other game objects found cleared.
🧹 Launcher
• The window title shows the port version and the play time: SHADOW OF THE COLOSSUS™ · v01.01 · Port v0.73 · 60 FPS · 0:12:34
• Updating clears the shader cache once (expect some stutter on the first start).
⚠️ Known Issues
• With the game's debug menu on, rare crashes can happen. Keep it off for normal play.
• Dust from footsteps can flash white on AMD Vega/GCN integrated GPUs (still under investigation).