Velocity Unbound Patch 1.0.2 Targets PC Shader Stutter; Console Hotfix Follows

Apex Torque has released patch 1.0.2 for Velocity Unbound on PC, two days after the arcade racer launched to complaints about hitching. The patch’s main change is a shader precompilation step that runs the first time you start the game, which Apex Torque says will take between four and eight minutes depending on your processor.

Players had reported sharp frame-time spikes the first time they drove through each of Meridian Bay’s districts, most noticeably at the tunnel exits in Harborline and during the weather transition in Night Shift events. Apex Torque says those were caused by shaders compiling during play, and that precompiling them up front should eliminate the majority of the problem. The patch also reduces streaming hitches when entering the downtown circuit at high speed.

• Shader precompilation on first launch and after driver updates.
• Reduced streaming hitches in Harborline and the downtown circuit.
• Fixed ultrawide resolutions stretching the race HUD.
• Fixed the slipstream indicator not appearing when the frame-rate cap was disabled.

We should have shipped with precompilation. We didn’t, and players paid for that on day one. This patch is the fix we should have had in the box.

Lucía Ferraro, technical director at Apex Torque, in a statement on the game’s community hub

Update, October 11, 19:00 UTC: Hotfix 1.0.3 is now live on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. It fixes Night Shift event rewards failing to appear in the garage and a crash in the livery editor when more than 200 decal layers were applied. Apex Torque says console players were not affected by the shader stutter addressed in 1.0.2. For a closer look at how the PC version runs after the patch, see our performance analysis.