How to Get the Best Mortal Shell II Performance on PC

To get the best balance of performance and image quality in Mortal Shell II, use DLSS Super Resolution on GeForce RTX GPUs, FSR on compatible Radeon hardware, or TSR otherwise. Set Global Illumination to High, Shadows to Medium, Textures and View Distance to Ultra, Visual Effects and Environment to High, Reflections to Ultra, Post Processing to High, and leave Hardware Ray Tracing disabled for now because the setting currently appears to have no effect.

Mortal Shell II uses several demanding Unreal Engine 5 technologies, including Nanite, Virtual Shadow Maps and Lumen. Despite that, its PC performance is relatively solid, with good shader compilation behavior and fewer traversal stutters than many other recent Unreal Engine 5 games.

Graphics setting	Recommended value
Upscaling	DLSS for GeForce RTX, FSR for compatible Radeon GPUs, TSR otherwise
Hardware Ray Tracing	Off
Global Illumination	High
Shadows	Medium
Anti Aliasing	Medium when using TSR
View Distance	Ultra
Textures	Ultra
Visual Effects	High
Reflections	Ultra
Post Processing	High
Environment	High
Seamless Dungeons Loading	On

Use High Global Illumination and Medium Shadows

Global Illumination should be kept at High.

Both High and Ultra use software Lumen for indirect lighting, but High retains most of the visual quality while avoiding the extra cost of Ultra. Dropping this setting too far noticeably reduces the quality of the game's lighting.

Shadows are more demanding. Medium offers a better compromise between performance and visual quality while retaining convincing shadows throughout Mortal Shell II's darker environments. Low is best avoided unless your GPU is struggling, as it reduces the quality of soft shadowing.

Keep Textures and View Distance at Ultra

Textures are one of the easiest settings to leave at maximum quality.

Testing showed only around 300MB of dedicated VRAM difference between Low and Ultra. An 8GB graphics card should generally be sufficient for Ultra textures at 1440p, while around 6GB should be workable at 1080p. For 4K, roughly 10GB or more is preferable.

These figures are practical estimates rather than fixed requirements because VRAM usage can change depending on location, resolution, background applications and future patches.

View Distance can also remain at Ultra because reducing it showed little meaningful performance improvement during testing.

Turn Hardware Ray Tracing off for now

Mortal Shell II includes a Hardware Ray Tracing option that is supposed to enable hardware accelerated Lumen for global illumination and reflections.

At present, however, enabling or disabling it appears to produce no noticeable change in either image quality or performance.

That means there is currently little reason to turn it on. This recommendation may change if a future patch fixes the feature.

Software Lumen remains active through the game's normal Global Illumination and Reflection settings, so disabling the Hardware Ray Tracing toggle does not mean removing all ray traced lighting.

Set Post Processing to High instead of Ultra

Post Processing is another setting where High is preferable.

The Ultra setting currently appears to cause Film Grain and Chromatic Aberration to remain active even when their individual switches are disabled.

Dropping Post Processing to High correctly removes those effects while retaining other features such as bloom and light shafts.

Motion Blur should also be disabled if you prefer a cleaner image because it can introduce visible noise around the character during camera movement.

Use High Environment settings to avoid Nanite Tessellation cost

Environment controls both the quality and density of environmental objects.

Ultra enables Nanite Tessellation, which adds additional geometric detail but also carries a notable GPU cost.

High retains most of the environmental density while avoiding that extra workload. During normal gameplay, the difference is difficult to appreciate compared with the performance penalty of running the maximum setting.

Optimized settings can improve FPS by about 25%

The optimized profile was tested against the Ultra preset at 2560x1440 using native resolution TSR.

Setting profile	Average FPS	1% low	0.1% low
Ultra preset	113	84	69
Optimized settings	141	100	69
Improvement	25%	19%	0%

Average performance increased from 113 FPS to 141 FPS, which works out to about a 25% gain.

The 1% low improved from 84 FPS to 100 FPS, an increase of approximately 19%. The 0.1% low remained at 69 FPS because occasional Unreal Engine 5 frame time spikes continued to influence the measurement.

Mortal Shell II PC requirements

Only minimum system requirements are currently provided.

Component	Minimum requirement
OS	Windows 10 or Windows 11
CPU	Intel Core i7 10700K or AMD Ryzen 5 3600
RAM	16GB
GPU	GeForce RTX 2060 Super 8GB or Radeon RX 6600 8GB
DirectX	DirectX 12
Storage	70GB
Drive	SSD required

No official recommended specification or resolution and frame rate target is provided.

CPU performance is generally reasonable. Testing suggests that a capable modern six core, 12 thread processor with reasonably fast DDR4 or DDR5 memory should be enough for around 60 FPS or better in most situations.

At much higher frame rates, memory latency, cache performance and clock speed become increasingly important.

FAQs

Should I enable Hardware Ray Tracing in Mortal Shell II?

No. The Hardware Ray Tracing option currently appears to make no observable difference to performance or image quality, so leaving it off is recommended until it is fixed.

What is the best upscaling option for Mortal Shell II?

Use DLSS Super Resolution on GeForce RTX GPUs. Compatible Radeon GPUs should use FSR, while TSR is the universal fallback. Start with Quality mode before reducing the upscaling quality further.

Can an 8GB graphics card run Ultra textures?

Yes, based on the supplied testing, 8GB of VRAM should generally be sufficient for Ultra textures at 1440p. Around 10GB or more is preferable for 4K.

Should I use the Ultra graphics preset?

Not necessarily. The optimized settings increased average performance by about 25% while preserving most of the Ultra preset's visual quality.

Does Mortal Shell II suffer from shader compilation stutter?

Shader compilation behavior is relatively good. The game performs a dedicated PSO compilation process before gameplay, and obvious shader compilation stutters were largely absent during testing, although occasional traversal related frame time spikes can still occur.