Unreal Engine 5 video games have earned a repute for being visually spectacular however usually tough to run easily, notably as soon as Lumen, Nanite, and Digital Shadow Maps enter the equation. Mortal Shell II is one other title constructed round these applied sciences, however the result’s significantly extra encouraging than some latest releases utilizing Epic’s engine.
Chilly Symmetry’s motion RPG will not be among the many very best-looking Unreal Engine 5 video games we now have seen, but it nonetheless delivers a pretty darkish fantasy presentation backed by the aforementioned high-end UE5 fashionable rendering options. Extra importantly, it does so with out putting an unreasonable load on fashionable PC {hardware}. The sport’s comparatively compact environments possible assist on this regard.
On this information, we are going to look at Mortal Shell II‘s technical characteristic set and official PC necessities earlier than analyzing CPU efficiency and the visual-to-performance traits of each related graphics setting. We are going to then use these outcomes to construct an optimized graphics profile that preserves a lot of the Extremely preset’s visible high quality whereas offering a considerable efficiency enchancment.
Gameplay And Technical Overview Of Mortal Shell II
Launched on August 20, 2026, Mortal Shell II is a standalone sequel to Chilly Symmetry’s 2020 Souls-like, developed by Chilly Symmetry and revealed by Playstack. It expands significantly upon its predecessor with a bigger interconnected world, extra in depth weapon customization, unrestricted exploration, and a sooner fight system that now not depends on a standard stamina bar.
Gamers as soon as once more take possession of fallen warriors often known as Shells, every of which supplies its personal skills and development choices. Eight misplaced warriors are scattered all through the world, whereas exploration can result in extra weapons, upgrades, curiosities, and non-compulsory areas away from the principle path. Chilly Symmetry describes the world as intentionally compact regardless of its extra open construction, slightly than making an attempt to construct an enormous open-world atmosphere for its personal sake.
From a technical standpoint, Mortal Shell II makes in depth use of Unreal Engine 5’s fashionable rendering stack, together with Nanite virtualized geometry, Digital Shadow Maps, and Lumen ray-traced international illumination and reflections. The ensuing presentation is sweet, notably in terms of lighting and environmental density, though it doesn’t rank among the many engine’s absolute visible showcases. Fortuitously, GPU efficiency can also be considerably more healthy than in lots of equally geared up UE5 video games.
The sport features a {Hardware} Ray Tracing choice that claims to allow hardware-accelerated Lumen for international illumination and reflections. In our testing, nevertheless, toggling it produced no noticeable visible or efficiency distinction, so it seems to be damaged in the intervening time. Different PC gamers have reported the identical habits, though some have experimented with manually forcing {hardware} ray tracing by configuration-file instructions. We didn’t use such workarounds for any of our benchmarks.
Its dealing with of shader compilation can also be good. Mortal Shell II features a devoted PSO compilation course of, and though the method seems to briefly repeat on subsequent launches even after the shaders have already been compiled, the end result throughout gameplay is efficient. Shader compilation stutters had been virtually absent in our testing, whereas traversal hitches had been restricted to a handful of minor body time excursions.
Temporal upscaling assist is in any other case fairly complete. The sport contains DLSS Tremendous Decision, AMD FSR Upscaling, and Unreal Engine 5’s Temporal Tremendous Decision, whereas body technology is obtainable by DLSS (Multi) Body Technology and AMD FSR Body Technology. Intel XeSS Tremendous Decision and XeSS Body Technology are sadly absent.
For GeForce RTX homeowners, DLSS Tremendous Decision ought to usually be the primary alternative. Radeon RX 7000 Collection and newer homeowners could make use of AMD’s newer FSR upscaling path, whereas TSR stays accessible because the common fallback. AMD presently helps newer ML-based FSR upscaling on RX 7000 {hardware} in suitable FSR titles, whereas the sport’s present PC listings determine FSR assist alongside DLSS and TSR.
Body technology is equally easy. Supported GeForce RTX GPUs ought to use DLSS Body Technology, with RTX 50 Collection homeowners having access to Multi Body Technology, whereas FSR Body Technology supplies a vendor-agnostic different for suitable AMD and Intel {hardware}.
HDR is sadly not supported in any respect.
One other fascinating choice is Seamless Dungeons Loading. We advocate leaving this enabled on programs with a sufficiently succesful CPU, system reminiscence configuration, and SSD. The choice permits dungeon belongings to be streamed with out interrupting gameplay. If a slower system struggles to carry out that streaming easily, disabling it introduces a short loading display screen earlier than getting into a dungeon, giving the engine extra time to load the required belongings as a substitute.
On the time of writing, the Steam page for Mortal Shell II supplies solely a minimal specification. There isn’t any separate really useful tier or said efficiency goal.
| Element | Minimal |
|---|---|
| Working System | Home windows 10 / Home windows 11 |
| CPU | Intel Core i7-10700K / AMD Ryzen 5 3600 |
| RAM | 16 GB |
| GPU | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER 8 GB / AMD Radeon RX 6600 8 GB |
| DirectX | DirectX 12 |
| Storage | 70 GB |
| Extra Notes | SSD required |
These necessities are considerably uncommon. The Core i7-10700K and Ryzen 5 3600 aren’t notably shut CPU equivalents, and with no decision, graphics preset, body price goal, or upscaling mode, it’s tough to find out precisely what Chilly Symmetry considers the minimal acceptable expertise.
The GPU suggestions are a minimum of extra easy. Each listed playing cards carry 8 GB of VRAM, which aligns pretty nicely with what we noticed throughout our personal testing. As we are going to focus on later, Mortal Shell II is sort of environment friendly in terms of devoted video reminiscence consumption.
The shortage of an official really useful configuration is disappointing, although. Offering each minimal and really useful tiers with specific decision, preset, upscaling, and frame-rate targets would give potential gamers a a lot clearer thought of what {hardware} they really want.
CPU Benchmark
Earlier than analyzing particular person graphics settings, we examined how Mortal Shell II behaves when CPU-limited.
The benchmark was carried out in a comparatively open part of the sport with a number of enemy NPCs roaming by the atmosphere. Though the realm itself will not be monumental, it locations sufficient stress on the CPU by sport logic, world streaming, animation, AI, and rendering submission to offer a helpful image of CPU-side efficiency.
The CPU benchmark and subsequent GPU-limited graphics comparisons had been carried out on the next system:
- CPU: Intel Core i7-14700K;
- RAM: 32 GB DDR5-7000;
- Storage: 2 TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD;
- GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 24 GB;
- Working System: Home windows 11 25H2.
Efficiency was captured utilizing CapFrameX.
CPU efficiency is respectable general, though the percentile lows aren’t fairly as spectacular as the common body price.
Throughout our 20-second benchmark run, the body time graph confirmed roughly 5 excursions past the 10-millisecond mark. These spikes pulled down the 1% lows and, specifically, the 0.1% lows relative to the common body price.
That sounds worse on paper than it usually feels throughout gameplay. The excursions manifest as very slight stutters {that a} notably delicate participant might discover, however they’re unlikely to noticeably disturb most customers, particularly when taking part in on a succesful Variable-Refresh Charge (VRR) show.
This additionally traces up with our broader expertise with the sport. Shader compilation stutters had been virtually nonexistent, and traversal stutters had been solely few and much between, so Mortal Shell II avoids the persistent hitching that has affected a number of different Unreal Engine 5 releases.
CPU utilization is fairly nicely distributed throughout a number of cores and threads. We’d count on any competent fashionable six-core/12-thread processor paired with fairly quick DDR4 or DDR5 reminiscence to ship a strong 60 FPS or increased expertise in most conditions.
At increased body charges, including nonetheless extra CPU cores is unlikely to offer a lot profit. As is more and more frequent in fashionable video games, performance finally turns into extra depending on clock frequency and, notably, the latency and bandwidth of the CPU’s cache and system-memory subsystem. Sooner reminiscence and CPUs with massive, low-latency caches can subsequently be particularly helpful when making an attempt to push nicely past 60 FPS.
A Deep Dive Into Mortal Shell II’s Graphics Settings
For the next assessments, each related graphics choice was in contrast below GPU-limited circumstances in opposition to the Extremely preset at 2560×1440. Unreal Engine 5’s TSR was used at native decision in order that temporal upscaling wouldn’t obscure the precise efficiency traits of particular person graphics settings.
Movement blur, movie grain, vignette, and chromatic aberration had been disabled wherever attainable, besides whereas instantly testing Put up-Processing. Put up-Processing was in any other case lowered particularly to forestall these results from interfering with the visible comparisons.
There is a vital caveat right here. The person Movie Grain and Chromatic Aberration switches look like bugged. Each results can stay enabled regardless of their respective toggles being switched off when Put up-Processing is about to Extremely. Setting Put up-Processing to Excessive or decrease accurately removes them, as can handbook Engine.ini configuration.
The graphics menu itself is fairly laid out and supplies helpful descriptions of each main graphics setting. Nevertheless, there isn’t a dwell comparability preview, and the sport doesn’t show real-time efficiency data, CPU/GPU body instances, VRAM consumption, or system specs. These options would have made graphics tuning significantly extra handy.
Temporal Anti-Aliasing/Upscaling
Mortal Shell II helps NVIDIA DLSS Tremendous Decision, AMD FSR Upscaling, and Unreal Engine 5’s Temporal Tremendous Decision.
GeForce RTX homeowners ought to use DLSS Tremendous Decision, because it supplies the very best mixture of temporal reconstruction high quality and efficiency on supported NVIDIA RTX GPUs, with High quality mode being the pure start line at 1440p and 4K.
AMD Radeon RX 7000 Collection and newer GPUs ought to use the sport’s FSR 4/ML Upscaling implementation. Different GPUs can fall again to TSR.
As ordinary, lowering the upscaling high quality mode ought to be handled individually from optimizing standard graphics settings. Begin with High quality and solely transfer towards Balanced or Efficiency when the GPU remains to be unable to succeed in the specified body price.
Suggestion: DLSS Tremendous Decision for GeForce RTX GPUs; FSR 4 for suitable AMD Radeon GPUs; TSR in any other case
{Hardware} Ray Tracing
{Hardware} Ray Tracing is meant to allow hardware-accelerated Lumen ray tracing for international illumination and reflections.
Sadly, the choice presently seems to do nothing. Switching it on or off produced no observable change in picture high quality or efficiency throughout our testing.
There’s subsequently no motive to allow it in its present state. If Chilly Symmetry fixes the choice in a future patch, we must revisit each its visible advantages and GPU value.
Suggestion: Off
International Illumination
International Illumination controls the standard of oblique diffuse lighting. Excessive and Extremely make use of software program Lumen ray tracing.
As a result of Lumen is liable for a lot of Mortal Shell II‘s oblique lighting presentation, decreasing this selection too aggressively will not be advisable, with the Low setting particularly trying slightly bland. Excessive preserves software program Lumen and appears very near Extremely throughout odd gameplay whereas avoiding the necessity to run the utmost setting.
Suggestion: Excessive
Shadows
Shadows controls each the decision and draw distance of the sport’s dynamic shadows, that are rendered utilizing Unreal Engine 5’s Digital Shadow Maps.
Extremely is pointless throughout regular gameplay. Medium affords the very best compromise in our comparisons, lowering the burden of higher-resolution and longer-distance shadow rendering whereas retaining the sport’s darkish environments visually convincing. Low appears to disable the reasonable comfortable shadowing impact of shadows and makes them look much less reasonable, so it ought to in all probability be averted except you are determined for extra efficiency.
Suggestion: Medium
Anti-Aliasing
The devoted Anti-Aliasing setting controls the standard of Unreal Engine 5’s Temporal Tremendous Decision slightly than choosing the temporal upscaler itself.
Medium is probably the most smart setting when TSR is getting used. Larger ranges supply diminishing visible enhancements relative to their extra processing value, whereas decreasing the choice additional can scale back temporal stability.
This setting turns into irrelevant when DLSS or FSR is chosen as a substitute.
Suggestion: Medium
View Distance
View Distance determines how distant objects can stay seen earlier than being culled by the engine.
Regardless of what the setting description would counsel, we couldn’t determine any significant efficiency or visible distinction between the accessible high quality ranges in our check scenes.
With no worthwhile efficiency benefit to lowering it, there’s little motive to simply accept probably extra aggressive distant-object culling.
Suggestion: Extremely
Textures
Textures controls texture decision.
That is one other setting that may safely stay maxed out on the overwhelming majority of recent gaming GPUs. Devoted VRAM utilization differed by solely round 300 MB between Low and Extremely in our testing.
Like many fashionable Unreal Engine 5 titles, Mortal Shell II seems to be fairly environment friendly with video reminiscence. Primarily based on our measurements, an 8 GB graphics card ought to be enough for 1440p utilizing Extremely textures, together with with the Extremely preset and native-resolution TSR.
Round 6 GB ought to be workable at 1080p, whereas 4K customers ought to ideally have a minimum of 10 GB accessible. These are sensible estimates slightly than ensures, since VRAM consumption can fluctuate in accordance with location, output decision, upscaling mode, background functions, and future patches.
Until your GPU is definitely exhibiting signs of VRAM exhaustion (similar to heavy stuttering or hitching), there’s little motive to decrease texture high quality.
Suggestion: Extremely
Visible Results
Visible Results controls the standard of the sport’s visible results and in addition impacts some lighting results.
Excessive was the very best steadiness in our comparisons. It retains the sport’s meant results high quality throughout fight and exploration whereas avoiding the extra overhead of Extremely.
Contemplating the significance of particles and lighting results to Mortal Shell II‘s dark-fantasy presentation, dropping this setting extra aggressively will not be well worth the visible compromise on a fairly succesful GPU.
Suggestion: Excessive
Reflections
Reflections controls the standard of oblique specular lighting.
Low and Medium depend on screen-space methods, whereas Excessive and Extremely have interaction software program Lumen ray-traced reflections. There’s additionally a extra instant downside with Medium: it seems visually damaged and ought to be averted altogether.
As a result of reflections type an essential a part of the sport’s lighting mannequin, we advocate staying inside the Lumen modes.
Curiously, Extremely remained worthwhile in our optimized profile. With the opposite pricey settings diminished, there was little motive in our testing to compromise reflection high quality, notably given the problematic decrease settings.
Suggestion: Extremely
Put up-Processing
Put up-Processing controls results similar to bloom, mild shafts, vignette, movement blur, depth of discipline, chromatic aberration, and movie grain.
Movement blur is especially aggressive and might introduce noticeable noise across the participant character whereas panning the digital camera. We strongly advocate disabling it.
Movie Grain and Chromatic Aberration must also be turned off, however there’s presently a catch. At Extremely Put up-Processing, these two results seem to stay force-enabled even when their particular person switches are disabled. Setting Put up-Processing to Excessive accurately removes them.
Bloom and light-weight shafts are significantly much less objectionable. Each can complement the lighting and ambiance, so there isn’t a urgent motive to disable them except you merely favor a cleaner presentation.
For that motive, Excessive is definitely preferable to Extremely even earlier than efficiency is taken into account.
Suggestion: Excessive
Setting
Setting determines the standard and density of environmental objects.
That is additionally one of many extra technically fascinating choices within the graphics menu as a result of Extremely allows Nanite Tessellation. In keeping with the sport’s personal description, the characteristic can significantly scale back efficiency.
Excessive retains the dense environmental presentation with out enabling the extra tessellation workload related to Extremely. Throughout precise gameplay, this trade-off is rather more engaging than paying the total GPU value for added geometric element that’s usually tough to understand whereas transferring by the world.
Suggestion: Excessive
Optimized Graphics Settings For Mortal Shell II
Primarily based on all of the testing above, these are our optimized graphics settings for Mortal Shell II:
| Graphics Setting | Optimized Worth |
|---|---|
| Upscaling Methodology | DLSS Tremendous Decision for GeForce RTX; FSR 4 for suitable Radeon GPUs; TSR in any other case |
| {Hardware} Ray Tracing | Off (Does not work presently) |
| International Illumination | Excessive |
| Shadows | Medium |
| Anti-Aliasing | Medium |
| View Distance | Extremely |
| Textures | Extremely |
| Visible Results | Excessive |
| Reflections | Extremely |
| Put up-Processing | Excessive |
| Setting | Excessive |
| Seamless Dungeons Loading | On |
This profile retains a lot of the sport’s essential rendering options intact. Software program Lumen ray tracing stays lively for each international illumination and reflections, textures and think about distance keep at their most values, and environmental element stays near Extremely with out paying for Nanite Tessellation.
Put up-Processing is intentionally set to Excessive slightly than Extremely due to the present Movie Grain and Chromatic Aberration bug. Even gamers with sufficient GPU efficiency to run every thing else at most ought to take into account making this specific change.
Body technology can then be added individually. GeForce RTX 40 Collection homeowners can use DLSS Body Technology, RTX 50 Collection GPUs can make the most of Multi Body Technology, and AMD or Intel customers with suitable {hardware} can use FSR Body Technology. As all the time, body technology works finest as soon as the underlying rendered body price is already snug sufficient to keep up responsive controls and steady picture reconstruction.
Extremely Preset Vs Optimized Graphics Settings
To measure the true advantage of the optimized profile, we in contrast it instantly in opposition to the Extremely preset below GPU-limited circumstances at 2560×1440 utilizing native-resolution TSR.
Each benchmark passes had been captured utilizing CapFrameX — utilizing an altered performance overlay — with the identical check space and methodology.
The outcomes from the above video had been as follows:
| Graphics Settings | Common FPS | 1% Low FPS | 0.1% Low FPS |
|---|---|---|---|
| Extremely Preset | 113 | 84 | 69 |
| Optimized Graphics Settings | 141 | 100 | 69 |
| Enchancment | +25% | +19% | +0% |
The development to common efficiency is substantial. Shifting from the Extremely preset to our optimized graphics profile elevated the common body price from 113 FPS to 141 FPS, representing a 25% enchancment.
The 1% lows additionally climbed from 84 FPS to 100 FPS, a rise of roughly 19%.
The 0.1% lows, nevertheless, remained unchanged at 69 FPS. This doesn’t imply the optimized settings fail to enhance normal frame-time consistency. As an alternative, the metric is being restricted by the handful of sporadic UE5-related stutters that may happen at totally different moments from one benchmark cross to a different. A single remoted frame-time tour can closely affect a 0.1% low end result throughout a comparatively quick benchmark.
Last Phrases
Mortal Shell II is among the extra encouraging Unreal Engine 5 releases we now have examined not too long ago from a efficiency perspective.
The sport makes use of a number of of the engine’s most demanding applied sciences, together with Lumen, Nanite, and Digital Shadow Maps, but it manages to ship respectable GPU efficiency and sufficient scalability to make graphics optimization worthwhile. Our optimized profile improves the common body price by round 25% and the 1% lows by 19% whereas preserving the overwhelming majority of the Extremely preset’s presentation.
Shader compilation dealing with is one other sturdy level. The devoted PSO compilation course of does its job, and apparent shader compilation stutters had been virtually nonexistent throughout our testing. Traversal-related body time spikes can nonetheless happen, however they’re comparatively rare and customarily delicate.
CPU efficiency is equally respectable. Common body charges might be fairly excessive on a quick processor, though a number of remoted frame-time excursions prevented the percentile figures from retaining tempo. Gamers concentrating on round 60 FPS ought to be nicely served by a fairly fashionable six-core/12-thread processor, whereas higher-refresh-rate customers will profit extra from sturdy single-threaded efficiency and a quick CPU cache/system-memory subsystem than from merely including extra cores.
There are nonetheless some technical tough edges for Chilly Symmetry to handle. HDR assist can be welcome, Intel XeSS ought to be added, the damaged {Hardware} Ray Tracing toggle wants fixing, and the person Movie Grain and Chromatic Aberration switches ought to truly override the Extremely Put up-Processing setting.
Even with these points, the underlying PC expertise is sort of strong. Mix our optimized settings with DLSS Tremendous Decision or FSR on supported {hardware}, add body technology the place applicable, and Mortal Shell II can ship considerably higher efficiency than the Extremely preset with surprisingly little affect on the sport’s visible presentation.
This information was primarily based on a Steam copy of Mortal Shell II offered by the writer.
In regards to the author: Sebastian Castellanos is a knowledge scientist by training and coaching. He is additionally deeply obsessed with PC gaming {hardware} and software program. He has not too long ago began writing technical articles and guides on Wccftech about PC hardware, video games and mods.
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