Performance issues in Marvel Rivals are ‘a major concern,’ NetEase acknowledges, but assures players a solution is on the way with an added feature.

Is there a Marvel supervillain themed around PC game memory requirements? Let’s assume that there is, and that her name is Dr RAMsbottom. For too long has Dr RAMsbottom – aka the Bottlenecking Belle, aka Zero Sub Sixty – plagued the lives of Marvel Rivals players. For too long has she reduced our superheroic exploits to an unsightly stop-motion parade.

Be of good heart, ye Rivals, for the boffins at NetEase (the ones that weren’t suddenly laid off in February) are devising some countermeasures. Specifically, they’re thinking about adding a box you can tick to somehow cut back the game’s memory usage “significantly” and improve your frame rate.

“On PC, we realize that [optimization] is a big problem, especially for the memory consumption,” Marvel Rivals director Guangyun Chen told cheery RPS fanzine PCGamer during an interview at GDC 2025. “So it may be that in Season 2, we will have an experimental check box in our launcher players can use to reduce memory [consumption] significantly.”

How this will work is unclear. Given that perceptions of lacklustre PC game performance vary wildly between users, I wouldn’t put it past NetEase to invoke the old placebo effect and literally just add a box to the title screen with “tick to realise your PC’s latent superpowers” written next to it in Arial Bold. Perhaps lying video game menus are Dr RAMsbottom’s Kryptonite? They should add a large arrow pointing to the box, just to be safe.

Chen wouldn’t be drawn on specifics by PCGamer. “It’s a very big problem, but it’s a lot of work to organize [a fix],” he acknowledged. “We cannot just release it in a small patch, we have to fully test it. But we realize the problem and we’re going to keep optimizing.”

I haven’t been excessively bothered myself by performance issues running Rivals on my 16GB PC, but then again, I am the kind of sicko who enjoys making pretty games run on low-spec machines. My verdicts are unsound. How have you been getting on with it?

Rivals Season 2 begins on 11th April, and there’s the promise of new Team-Ups, among other things.