Dying Light: The Beast – How to Boost Performance (Epic Games)

You’ve just dropped into the intense, immersive, and terrifying world of Dying Light: The Beast. You’re sneaking through a dark building, the tension is mounting, and just as a Volatile shrieks in the distance, a massive notification for a friend request or an achievement pops up, completely covering a third of your screen and shattering the atmosphere. You’ve set your Epic Games status to “Do Not Disturb,” but the pop-ups keep coming.

If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. This is a common and frustrating issue with the Epic Games overlay for many players. While the overlay offers useful social features, its notifications can be incredibly intrusive, and it can also consume valuable system resources that could be used to improve your game’s performance. The problem is that Epic Games does not provide an official, easy-to-find toggle to completely disable it.

But don’t lose hope. The PC gaming community has found a clever and permanent workaround. This guide will provide you with a complete, step-by-step walkthrough of this method, allowing you to permanently disable the Epic Games overlay for a cleaner, more immersive, and potentially higher-performance gaming experience in the world of Castor Woods.

Why Disable the Epic Games Overlay? The Pros and Cons

Before we dive into the technical steps, it’s important to understand what you gain and what you lose by disabling the overlay.

The Downsides of the Overlay (Why You Want to Disable It)

• Intrusive Notifications: As many players have reported, the overlay’s notifications for achievements, friend requests, and game invites can be very large and distracting. Worse, they often seem to completely ignore the “Do Not Disturb” status, popping up at the most inopportune moments.
• Performance Impact: Every overlay, no matter how optimized, runs as a separate application in the background while you play. It consumes a small but constant amount of your CPU and RAM resources. For players on low-to-mid-range PCs, disabling the overlay can free up these resources and potentially lead to a smoother frame rate and less stuttering.
• Software Conflicts: Overlays are notorious for causing conflicts with other essential PC gaming applications, such as screen recording software (like OBS or ShadowPlay) or other game launchers and performance monitoring tools. Disabling it can often solve mysterious crashing or stability issues.

The Benefits of the Overlay (What You Will Lose)

While it can be annoying, the overlay is the primary hub for all of Epic’s social features. By disabling it, you will lose easy in-game access to:

• Your Epic Games Friends List: You won’t be able to see who is online or send/receive messages through the in-game interface.
• Game Invites: You will no longer receive pop-up notifications for game invites from your friends.
• Achievement Pop-ups: You will still earn achievements, but you will not see the notification for them appear on your screen when they unlock.

For most players who are focused on an immersive single-player experience or who communicate with their friends through other applications like Discord, the benefits of disabling the overlay far outweigh these minor losses.

The Permanent Fix: Renaming the Overlay Files (Step-by-Step Walkthrough)

This workaround is a simple, safe, and one-time procedure that permanently prevents the overlay from launching alongside the game.

How This Workaround Functions

This method works by finding the actual executable (.exe) files that are responsible for running the overlay and simply renaming them. When Dying Light: The Beast tries to launch the overlay at startup, it will look for these files by their original names. When it can’t find them, the overlay process simply fails to start, without crashing or affecting the game itself.

Step 1: Launch the Game and Open Task Manager

First, you must launch Dying Light: The Beast from the Epic Games Launcher. The overlay process will only be running while the game is active, so you need the game open to find it. You do not need to wait for the game to load to the main menu; you can do this as soon as the initial loading screen appears.

Once the game is running, open the Windows Task Manager. The fastest way to do this is to press the key combination Ctrl + Shift + Esc.

Step 2: Find the “EOSOverlayRenderer” Process

In the Task Manager, make sure you are on the “Processes” tab. You will see a list of all the applications and background processes currently running on your computer. Scroll down the list and look for a process named “EOSOverlayRenderer.” It will have the iconic white and black Unreal Engine logo next to it.

Once you find it, click the small arrow to its left to expand the process tree and show its child processes.

Step 3: Open the File Location

Now that you’ve found the process, you need to find where its files are located on your hard drive. Right-click on one of the child processes that appears under “EOSOverlayRenderer” (the indented ones). From the context menu that appears, click on “Open file location.”

This will automatically open a File Explorer window directly to the folder that contains the overlay’s executable files.

Step 4: Rename the Two Executable Files

In the folder that just opened, you will see two files that have the exact same name: EOSOverlayRenderer-Win32-Shipping.exe. These are the two files you need to rename.

The new name doesn’t matter at all, but a common and recommended practice for disabling files like this is to simply add .bak to the end of the filename. This tells you that it is a “backup” file and makes it easy to change back later if you ever want to.

1. Right-click on the first EOSOverlayRenderer-Win32-Shipping.exe file and choose “Rename.”
2. Add .bak to the end of the name, so it becomes EOSOverlayRenderer-Win32-Shipping.exe.bak.
3. Press Enter. Windows may ask you to grant administrator permission to confirm the change. Click “Continue.”
4. Repeat this exact process for the second file with the same name.

Step 5: Restart the Game and Enjoy!

That’s it! You can now close the Task Manager and the File Explorer window. Close Dying Light: The Beast and then relaunch it from the Epic Games Launcher. The game will now start without the intrusive Epic Games overlay, allowing you to enjoy a cleaner and more immersive experience.

How to Re-Enable the Overlay

If you ever change your mind and want to use the social features of the overlay again, the process is just as simple.

1. Follow Steps 1-3 above to find the file location again.
2. Find the two files you renamed (e.g., EOSOverlayRenderer-Win32-Shipping.exe.bak).
3. Right-click each file, choose “Rename,” and simply delete the .bak you added to the end, restoring them to their original names.
4. The next time you launch the game, the overlay will function as normal.

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