Soulmask launched to some pretty positive reviews, but also with some 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 for reference, and make some setup suggestions to hopefully squeeze every last frame out of this title. .
Soulmask recommended specs to prevent lag and stuttering
First, let’s take a look at Soulmask’s recommended and minimum specs listed on the store page.
Minimum Specifications:
- Windows 10 (64 Bit)
- Intel Core i5-8400 or AMD Ryzen 3 3300X
- 16GB of RAM
- GTX 970 4GB or AMD RX 580 4GB
Recommended Specifications
- Windows 11
- Intel Core i7-9700 or AMD Ryzen 7 3700X
- 24GB of RAM
- RTX 3060 or AMD 6700XT
- SSD (With the note that this is ‘Highly Recommended’)
As such, a good place to start to make sure your performance is the best it might be to make sure you’re rocking at least one set of these specs.
Or at least, it should be, but thanks to my less-than-stellar CPU, I can give you some important information on this spec list.
My CPU is (please don’t laugh) an i7-4790K from the prehistoric era of 2014. And yet, in Soulmask, I get a very constant and consistent 60 frames per second in the early game, even at maximum graphics settings. This can of course change, thanks to the large amount of NPCs you will collect along the way.
What I do have, however, is an RTX 3060, 32GB of RAM and an SSD. This implies that Soulmask is extremely GPU-bound, so having a decent GPU, a solid amount of high-speed RAM and an SSD to run it accounts for most of the performance here.
Soulmask tuning graphics suggestions
I’ll go over some of the settings listed above, and break some of them down to explain what might be best for your setup.
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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 affects your performance positively. This is because while in exclusive full screen, many background processes on your computer are paused because there is no need to render them directly, but in unlimited, some background processes continue to run normally.
Resolution
It is advised to keep your resolution native to what your monitor is running here; and if you intend to scale up 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 just simple checks that figure out what you’re running hardware-wise. They cannot be responsible for background resource usage, any logging software, or 73 browsers. If you’re going to be running a lot of things in the background while gaming, it’s always best to go a little lower than they would suggest.
Since the next section of settings may vary depending on the hardware you are running, I will express whether each setting is high impact and low impact.
- Shadows – High Impact
- Anti-alienation – High Impact
- View Distance – High Impact
- Textures – Low/High Impact (Depends a lot on your GPU)
- Visual Effects – Low/High Impact (Depends a lot 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 there are two really important ones to discuss if you have a lot of stuttering problems. V-Sync is designed to lock your game to your screen’s refresh rate, and turning it on or off incorrectly can lead to stuttering and some visual issues.
If you run a monitor with a refresh rate of 60HZ, and you get constant more than 60FPS, you want to turn this setting on. If you’re running a monitor with a 120HZ refresh rate but consistently get less than 120FPS, turn off the setting and then lock your framerate to get closer to what you’re getting—be it 60FPS or 90FPS.
It’s also important to note in both situations that you may want to lock your frame rate to something your system can achieve. In my case, I have V-Sync on, because of my monitor, and because I often get over 60FPS otherwise.
DLSS and FSR
NVidia’s DLSS and AMD’s FSR are both incredibly complicated pieces of technology that I can’t really begin to understand, but what I’ve learned is that they’re not the magic buttons that people sometimes advertise.
DLSS can do something called high scalewhich is when DLSS takes your native resolution and, using deep-learning-AI-whatever-mumbo-jumbo, makes your game look like it runs in a higher resolution.
For example, you might be running your game in 1080P, but DLSS will try to make it look like you’re running at 1440P.
This is great for images, 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 images, while the Activity setting will give you hugely increased performance but noticeably worse images, so experiment with this one to find what works for you.
Please note, however, that DLSS is only available on more than 20 series NVidia GPUs, and does not work at all on AMD GPUs.
FSR is very much the same thing, however, one notable advantage to this one is that it is available to a much, much wider range of GPUs. This includes even 9 and 10 series NVidia GPUs, giving them a nice new lease of life. Unfortunately, it looks like Soulmask doesn’t use FSR 3.0, which is some wonder that makes for some Frame Generation malarkey that people go wild for.
Soul Mask Stuttering
My first experience with the stuttering in Soulmask came from the opening cutscene, which ran absolutely horribly. Strangely, though, even though the stuttering continued when actually in-game for a short time, they went away relatively quickly. It turns out that this is because the engine that Soulmask (Unreal) runs on does not allow for shader precompilation, which causes stuttering during the first few moments of a play session.
The length of these stutters will, of course, depend on your hardware, but unfortunately, unless CampFire Studio adds some of these features in a patch, it might be a while.
You can try to reduce the severity of these stutters by adjusting your in-game settings, closing some background programs, and making sure you’re running in exclusive full-screen mode.
Hopefully, this guide helped you understand some graphics settings and terms and helped beef up those frames and reduce those stutters a little!
If you’re looking for more Soulmask content from us here at Pro Game Guides, check out ours breaking of the three initial masks; and if you’re looking to jump in with some friends, we’ve got a handy dedicated server guide here.
