Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord is out!
Like most games, however, there are a bunch of issues, and you might be experiencing lag or stuttering, which is probably why you’re here.
By following this guide, you can expect to fix issues like lagging, freezing, low FPS, stuttering, lag spikes, crashes and FPS drops.
We will help you get the best FPS that your PC can give you. Optimize Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord today to enjoy a better gaming experience.
First things first, you will need to ensure that you meet the recommended system requirements below. If you don’t meet at least the minimum system requirements, you’ll likely get some FPS issues. We advise you to upgrade your PC if that’s the case.
Minimum System Requirements
- OS: Windows 7 (64-bit only)
- CPU: Intel® Core™ i3-8100 / AMD Ryzen™ 3 1200
- RAM: 6 GB
- GPU: Intel® UHD Graphics 630 / NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 660 2GB / AMD Radeon™ HD 7850 2GB
- HDD: 60 GB
Recommended System Requirements
- OS: Windows 10 (64-bit only)
- CPU: Intel® Core™ i5-9600K / AMD Ryzen™ 5 3600X
- RAM: 8 GB
- GPU: NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1060 3GB / AMD Radeon™ RX 580
- HDD: 60 GB
Whether your PC meets the requirements mentioned above or not, you are bound to get a good FPS boost by following this guide. Let’s start with the most obvious optimization:
Table of ContentsShow
Update Your GPU drivers
This may sound obvious, but updating your drivers is the first thing that you must do. This is because AMD and NVIDIA usually release new drivers that can increase FPS drastically after game launches. It’s as easy as updating a piece of software on your PC.
Open AMD Radeon Software (for AMD GPUs) or NVIDIA GeForce Experience (for NVIDIA GPUs) and check for updates. If there’s an update available, download and install it.
Here’s a screenshot of our NVIDIA GeForce Experience during an update:
Once the download is finished, simply click on the green Express Installation and you are good to go once the installation is complete.
Best Graphics Settings For Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord
The next step is to optimize the settings in the game itself. This is probably what you came here for anyway, so let’s get started.
Note that these settings prioritize High Performance. If you have a PC that barely meets the minimum or recommended system requirements, you can skip this step, but if you have a powerful PC and don’t want to sacrifice your visual settings for extra performance, stay with us.
So without any further ado, let’s get started:
- Open up Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord
- Click on Options on the main menu
- Click on the Video tab
- Set Display Mode to Fullscreen
- Set Screen Resolution to Desktop Resolution
- Set Resolution Scale to 100. You can try to experiment with this by setting it to 95 and using higher settings. People have reported positive results by doing this, but we can’t say the same.
- Set Frame Limiter to your monitor’s native refresh rate (for example, 144 or 60). If your frame rate jumps around too much and you’re not satisfied, set it to a lower value, but 60 will generally give you a good experience.
- Set V-Sync to None
- Set Sharpen Amount to 0.00
- Click on the Performance tab
- Set Battle Size to:
- 500 or above if you have a good graphics card and a good processor
- 200-250 for best performance
- Set Overall to Custom
If you have a powerful enough card (e.g. one with 6GB of VRAM or more), you can set this to High or Very High. We didn’t notice a big difference between the Very High and Medium presets anyway. - Set Shader Quality to Medium
- Texture Streaming Budget:
If your GPU has 1 GB of video memory (or lower), set this to Low
If your GPU has 2-4 GB of video memory, set this to Medium
If your GPU has 4-6 GB of video memory, set this to High
If your GPU has above 6 GB of video memory, set this to Very High - Set Texture Quality to Medium
- Set Shadow Quality to Low
- Set Shadow Type to None
- Set Shadow Filtering to None
- Set Particle Detail to Low
- Set Particle Quality to Low
- Set Foliage Quality to Low
- Set Character Detail to Medium
- Set Environment Detail to Low (this setting has a large impact on performance)
- Set Terrain Quality to Medium
- Set Number of Ragdolls to 0. If you want realistic rag-doll movements and you believe your GPU can handle it, set it to 5.
- Set Occlusion Method to None
- Set Texture Filtering to Trilinear
- Set Water Quality to Low
- Set Anti-Aliasing to None. This setting has a huge impact on performance. If you experience visual issues related to anti-aliasing, increase this setting to Temporal SMAA.
- Set Lighting Quality to Low
- Set Decal Quality to Low
- Set Depth of Field to Disable
- Set Screen Space Reflection to On
- Set Cloth Simulation to Off
- Set Interactive Grass to Off
- Set Sun Shafts to Off
- Set Subsurface Scattering to Off
- Set Tesselation to Off
- Set Bloom to Off
- Set Film Grain to Off
- Set Motion Blur to Off
We generally don’t recommend switching any setting to Very Low. Also, if you are more than satisfied with your FPS after applying these settings, feel free to fine-tune them to your liking so that you get the best visuals while still playing with an acceptable frame rate.
Optimize NVIDIA Control Panel Settings
If you have an NVIDIA graphics card, you can optimize the NVIDIA Control Panel by following these steps:
- Open NVIDIA Control Panel.
- Click on Adjust Image Settings with Preview on the left side under 3D Settings.
- Click on Use my preference emphasizing and move the slider to Performance if it is not there already.
- Click on Apply.
All good! Let’s now manage some game-specific settings:
- Click on Manage 3D Settings
- Click on Program Settings
- Select Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord from the dropdown menu
- Set Power management mode to Prefer maximum performance. You may want to split test this as well as the Optimal power as this setting’s effect depends on your GPU.
- Set Preferred refresh rate to Highest available
- Set Shader Cache to On
- Set Texture filtering – Quality to High performance
- Set Triple buffering to Off
- Set Vertical sync to Off
- Set Virtual Reality pre-rendered frames to 1
If you have a laptop, make sure you have selected “High-performance NVIDIA processor” as the preferred graphics processor.
Optimize AMD Radeon Settings
If you have an AMD graphics card, follow these steps to optimize your AMD Radeon settings:
- Open up AMD Radeon Settings
- Click on the Gaming tab
- Click on Global Settings
- Set Anti-aliasing Mode to Override application settings
- Set Anti-aliasing Level to 2X
- Set Anisotropic Filtering Mode to On
- Set Anisotropic Filtering Level to 2X
- Set Texture Filtering Quality to Performance
- Set Wait for Vertical Refresh to Always Off
- Set Tessellation Mode to Override application settings
- Set Maximum Tessellation Level to 32x or lower
Disable Windows Update Delivery Optimization
Moving on, there’s a simple thing we can do to free up some resources:
- Open the Windows Start Menu, enter Windows Update settings and click on the search result for it
- Click on Advanced Options
- Click on Delivery Optimization
- Make sure that the Allow downloads from other PCs setting is off
Disable OneDrive
We also recommend that you disable OneDrive if you’re not using it. Right-click on the OneDrive icon on your taskbar and click on Exit.
Optimize Discord
Perhaps you’re using Discord for communication. Most PC gamers do, anyway.
Here’s how you optimize Discord:
- Open up Discord and go to the User Settings page
- Click on the Appearance tab and uncheck the Hardware Acceleration setting
- Click on the Overlay tab
- Make sure that Enable in-game overlay is unchecked
Optimizing Google Chrome
If you’re using Google Chrome, you can turn off hardware acceleration as well. We recommend doing this and here’s how:
- Open Google Chrome and go to the Settings page
- Scroll down to the end and click on the Advanced tab
- Scroll down to the end and make sure that the setting Use hardware acceleration when available is switched off
- Make sure that the setting Continue running background apps when Google Chrome is closed is switched off
- Relaunch Google Chrome
High-Performance Power Plan
You can boost the performance by enabling the high-performance power plan on your PC. Just follow these simple steps:
- Open the Windows start menu
- Type powercfg.cpl and press Enter
- Select the High performance option
Enable Game Mode
Windows 10 has a setting called Game Mode that we recommend you turn on. Here’s how you do it:
- Open the Windows start menu
- Type Game mode settings and press Enter
- Make sure that the Game Mode option is turned on
Some people recommend turning Game Mode off, but that was correct a long time ago. Game Mode is actually good now and we recommend that you turn it on.
SSD
If you have Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord installed on your HDD (which we don’t recommend), you can get much faster loading times by installing the game on an SSD if you own one.
Final Thoughts
And that’s it! Hopefully, you will get much higher frame rates now and your gaming experience should be much better.