It’s been just over six weeks since BioShock Infinite was released on the PC, but if you’re one of the people who’s run into the strange stuttering/framerate lag bug you’ve probably held off on playing it. A seventeen page thread on 2K’s support forums details the various woes of the bug, along with confirmation that it occurs on a wide range of PC hardware.
A decent example of what this looks like in (non)motion can be seen here. Effectively, the game’s framerate appears to fall apart at certain, periodic points in the level. While it doesn’t make the title completely unplayable, it looks like it would severely disrupt a play-through and must be irritating for people who have hardware that should not struggle in the slightest with BioShock Infinite.
2K’s stance on the issue is that the Irrational Games is working on a patch. However, after lengthy periods of silence from both publisher and developer, along with the lack of any definitive timeline for that patch, people who bought the game on the day of release are getting restless.
One enterprising fellow going by the username ‘hlhbk’ has tried to get answers from a variety of sources (2K and Irrational twitter accounts, along with Irrational’s Christopher Kline) but has only received stock replies.
According to 2K, “Patch is still being investigated/tested. We’ll update everyone once there is more news.” There’s no indication, or even an estimate, of how long this testing process may last.
2K has had problems with supporting its games in the past. An audio imbalance issue in the PC release of BioShock 2 was never fixed, and the community had to turn to modders when 2K insisted that the restrictive FOV in The Darkness 2 could not be altered (it could, and was.) Let’s hope the publisher does a little better with BioShock Infinite.
