2K's launcher seems to negatively impact Midnight Suns' performance, but you can turn it off
Failure to launch.
Friends, comrades, fellow fighters for truth and justice, you should turn off the 2K launcher for Marvel's Midnight Suns. Partially because a number of players are reporting meaningful performance gains with the launcher deactivated, but mostly because it's worthless bloatware and, well, why would you leave it on?
First noted by Rock Paper Shotgun, it seems that turning off the 2K launcher that usually, uselessly appears whenever you fire up Midnight Suns can net you a significant framerate boost in some circumstances. Players on Reddit seem to concur, with some users observing gains of >10 fps when they turn the launcher off. If you'd like to do that yourself, there's a handy guide on Steam.
We tried it ourselves at PCG, and while our findings were less dramatic, the changes were positive. Our average framerate rose from 50 to 55 fps on a 3080 Ti at 1440p on "Epic" settings (with ray tracing on), while our 0.1% low jumped from 4 to 17 fps. We also observed less stuttering in general with the launcher off. Not quite as dramatic a transformation, but nevertheless an improvement. Besides, our findings could all be down to a slight difference in setup.
No one's figured out just what it is the 2K launcher is doing to impact performance. Players have reported similar issues with the software in other 2K games, including Mafia, Civ 6, XCOM, and others. It's almost impressive that an app so tiny and pointless manages to wreak so much havoc.
And the thing is, even if you can't achieve some transformative change to Midnight Suns by deactivating the launcher, why not turn it off anyway? The 2K launcher—like all launchers—is a minor annoyance on its best days, and on its worst it'll just stop your games from working altogether. So remember, you can find a guide to switch it off right here, and I recommend doing so even if your framerate is just fine.