Mortal Shell 2 has typical optimization for a game on Unreal Engine 5 – the game suffers from stutters and Lumen issues

DSOGaming continues putting new releases through their paces, and this time the outlet turned its attention to Mortal Shell 2, the souls-like built on Unreal Engine 5.2. Testing was done on a rig featuring an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 32GB of DDR5 RAM at 6000MHz, and a wide range of GPUs – from AMD Radeon RX 6900XT to NVIDIA RTX 5090. The benchmarks ran on Windows 10 64-bit using the GeForce 610.88 and Radeon Adrenalin Edition 26.7.1 drivers.

Mortal Shell 2 turned out to be a title where performance hinges almost entirely on the GPU. Even at 1080p, the flagship RTX 5090 was pushed to its limits. Most of the tested cards still managed a steady 60fps at that resolution, and the RTX 2080Ti delivered a smooth experience too, provided you're using a G-Sync monitor.

At 1440p with ultra settings, the top five GPUs had no trouble staying above 60fps at all times. The RTX 3080 also handled the load well, though a smooth experience there again depends on having a G-Sync display.

As for native 4K at ultra settings, only the RTX 5090 managed to keep the frame rate above 60 FPS without any drops. The RTX 4090 averaged 63 FPS, which is still a strong result for a title running Unreal Engine 5 with both Lumen and Nanite enabled at once.

Despite the otherwise impressive performance, the game shows some serious artifacts tied to the Lumen global illumination system. Still, as the outlet put it, "It actually looks great. It's not THE best-looking game of 2026."

It's also worth mentioning the traversal stutters that popped up periodically during testing. For a souls-like, that kind of micro-freeze isn't exactly welcome, especially since the same issue was already present back in the open beta build.

Fortunately, the problem isn't nearly as bad as it was in Oblivion Remastered, where similar stuttering did far more damage to the overall experience.

Overall, Mortal Shell 2 shows noticeably better optimization than most modern Unreal Engine 5 games. At the same time, it suffers from visual issues that more demanding competitors on the same engine manage to avoid. Cold Symmetry clearly chose performance over visual fidelity here.