How to reduce stuttering and lag in Soulmask

Soulmask launched to some pretty positive reviews, but also with pretty notable performance complaints. In this guide, I'll break down the minimum and recommended hardware your PC should be running, provide you with my benchmarks along with my specs as a point of reference, and make some setting suggestions to hopefully squeeze every last frame out of this title.

Soulmask recommended specs to prevent lagging and stutter

Firstly, let's take a look at the Soulmask recommended and minimum specs listed on the store page.

As such, a good place to start to make sure your performance is the best it can possibly be is to ensure you're rocking at least one set of these specs.

Or at least, that's how it should be, but thanks to my less-than-stellar CPU, I can give you some important information regarding this list of specs.

My CPU is (please don't laugh) an i7-4790K from the prehistoric era of 2014. And yet, in Soulmask, I am achieving a very steady and consistent 60 frames per second in the early game, even on maximum graphical settings. This is, of course, subject to change, thanks to the large amount of NPCs you'll be collecting down the line.

What I do have, however, is an RTX 3060, 32GB of RAM, and an SSD. This implies that Soulmask is heavily GPU-bound, so having a decent GPU, a solid amount of high-speed RAM, and an SSD to run it from are responsible for the bulk of the performance here.

Soulmask graphics settings suggestions

I'll go through some of the settings listed above, and break down some of them to explain what might be best for your setup.

Display

There are many reasons to use a borderless window as opposed to an exclusive fullscreen in any game, but the simple fact is that using an exclusive fullscreen does impact your performance in a positive way. This is because while in exclusive fullscreen, many background processes on your PC are paused as there's no need to render them directly, but in borderless, any background processes continue to run as normal.

Resolution

It's advised to keep your resolution native to what your monitor is running here; and if you intend to upscale using either DLSS or FSR, that will be covered later.

Quality Presets

You can use the settings the game suggests, but as with all things, they're only simple checks that figure out what you're running hardware-wise. They can't account for background resource usage, any recording software, or 73 browser tabs. If you're going to be running a lot of stuff in the background during play, it's always best to go a little lower than they would suggest.

Because the next section of settings can vary depending on the hardware you're running, I'll express whether each setting is high impact and low impact.

• Shadows - High Impact
• Anti-Aliasing - High Impact
• View Distance - High Impact
• Textures - Low/High Impact (Depending greatly on your GPU)
• Visual Effects - Low/High Impact (Depending greatly on your CPU)
• Post-Processing Effects - Low Impact
• Foliage Quality - High Impact
• Motion Blur - Low Impact
• Depth Of Field - Low Impact
• Point-Light Shadow - Low/High Impact (Depending on your GPU)

V-Sync and Frame Rate Limit are two really important ones to discuss if you're having a lot of stuttering issues. V-Sync is designed to lock your game to the refresh rate of your monitor, and having it on or off incorrectly can lead to stutters and some visual issues.

If you're running a monitor with a refresh rate of 60HZ, and you're getting consistently more than 60FPS, you want to turn this setting on. If you're running a monitor with a 120HZ refresh rate but are getting consistently less than 120FPS, turn the setting off and then lock your framerate to get closer to what you're getting—be that 60FPS or 90FPS.

It's also important to note in both situations that you may want to lock your framerate to something your system can achieve. In my case, I have V-Sync on, on account of my monitor, and because I frequently get more than 60FPS otherwise.

DLSS and FSR

DLSS by NVidia and FSR by AMD are both incredibly complicated pieces of technology that I cannot really begin to understand, but what I have learned is that they are not the magic buttons people sometimes herald them to be.

DLSS can perform something called upscaling, which is when DLSS takes your native resolution and, using deep-learning-AI-whatever-mumbo-jumbo, renders your game to look like it's running in a higher resolution.

For example, you might be running your game in 1080P, but DLSS will attempt to make it look like you're running at 1440P.

This is great for visuals, but it can also be used for major (and I mean MAJOR) performance increases. The Quality setting will give you a smaller boost but better visuals, while the Performance setting will give you massively increased performance but noticeably worse visuals, so experiment with this one to find what works for you.

Please note however that DLSS is only available on 20+ series NVidia GPU's, and does not work at all on AMD GPU's.

FSR is very much the same thing, however, one notable benefit to this one is that it's available to a much, much wider range of GPU's. This includes even 9 and 10 series NVidia GPU's, giving them a nice new lease of life. Sadly, it appears Soulmask doesn't use FSR 3.0, which is some wunderkind that does some Frame Generation malarkey that people go wild for.

Soulmask Stuttering

My first experience with the stuttering in Soulmask came from the opening cutscene, which ran absolutely awfully. Strangely, though, even though the stutters persisted when actually in-game for a brief time, they went away relatively quickly. Turns out this is because the engine Soulmask is running on (Unreal) does not allow for shader pre-compiling, which causes stuttering for the first few moments of a play session.

The length of these stutters will, of course, depend on your hardware, but sadly, unless CampFire Studio adds some of this functionality in a patch, it might just stick around for a while.

You can attempt to reduce the severity of these stutters by adjusting your settings in-game, closing some background programs, and making sure you're running in exclusive fullscreen.

Hopefully, this guide has helped you understand some graphical settings and terms and assisted in boosting those frames and reducing those stutters a little!

If you're looking for more Soulmask content from us here at Pro Game Guides, check out our breakdown of the three starting masks; and if you're looking to jump in with some friends, we've got a handy dedicated server guide here.

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