Permafrost turned FSR off on every RTX generation in two hotfixes under four hours apart

Survival game Permafrost reached Early Access on October 9 and spent the rest of the day taking an upscaler away from Nvidia owners. SpaceRocket Games switched FSR off for RTX 20 and 30 cards, then switched it off for RTX 40 and 50 cards three hours and 50 minutes later, leaving no GeForce RTX generation with the option.

Permafrost entered Early Access on October 9, with the preview feedback folded into the launch build. Image: SpaceRocket Games

The first hotfix went up at 17:24 UTC with a single line: "FSR is now disabled for NVIDIA RTX 20 and 30 series graphics cards, to reduce crashes on these GPUs." The second landed at 21:14 UTC: "FSR is now disabled on NVIDIA RTX 40 and 50 series graphics cards, to cut down crashes on these GPUs." Both posts are scoped to Nvidia hardware, and neither says anything about AMD or Intel cards. Timestamps re-read at 21:48 UTC on October 10.

The known-issues list tells players to switch the upscaler off themselves

A pinned thread titled "Known Issues & Workarounds (Updated October 10)", posted by kikibrik under a [developer] badge, goes further than the patch notes. For crashes it advises: "in Settings > Video, turn Multi-Frame-Generation-Type off, turn Super Resolution off, lower the quality preset and toggle V-Sync. If it still crashes, add -dx11 to your launch options."

FSR is not named anywhere in that list. The settings it tells players to switch off are Multi-Frame-Generation-Type and Super Resolution, and the fallback carries a cost the studio states plainly: "DX11 runs slower than DX12: expected. Only use DX11 if DX12 crashes for you." The same list covers co-op joining, stuck quests and a missing church roof key, and points players at the studio's log upload site.

The launch slipped before any of this

The day started with a delay. In a post at 11:15 UTC titled "Launching in a Few Hours", SpaceRocket wrote that feedback from a two-hour preview was being folded into the launch build rather than patched in afterwards, "and Permafrost won't go live at 14:00 CEST as planned". The additions it named were rebindable movement keys, "one of your most requested changes", plus performance improvements, co-op improvements and localisation fixes.

So the renderer work and the launch arrived together, and the first thing the build did in public was shed a feature on four generations of Nvidia cards.

October 10 brought crash fixes and an upscaler update

A larger patch went out at 19:36 UTC on October 10, listing five crashes and stutters by cause: skipping the intro video, joining while another player holds a ranged weapon, using a held consumable, reloading a campfire on the world map, and stutters caused by stair building parts. One further line reads "Updated DLSS and FSR", with nothing said about whether FSR returns for Nvidia cards. The rest is quest and co-op repair, including quest items no longer vanishing from the world when picked up.

Four days before launch, in a letter signed by the whole development team, the studio had set the tone: "We want to be completely honest with you: we know the game isn't perfect yet." It added that the team "started this journey almost four years ago" and is still a small one.

Upscalers have been an awkward dependency across the whole PC beat this month. Hellraiser: Revival shipped without 6X frame generation and Nvidia told owners to add it themselves through a driver override. Permafrost is the inverse case: the vendor technology is present, and the developer has taken it away from the cards it was crashing on until it can be made to behave.