A Plague Tale Requiem: How To Fix Lag, FPS Drops & Stuttering

A Plague Tale Requiem just came out, and the game isn’t polished as I had expected it to be. Asobo took three years to develop this game, and it still hasn’t fixed the issues that Innocence had. In this article, I will talk about some basic fixes that can help you in improving game performance.

I had horrible stutters and FPS Drops while playing the game on a high-end PC, which most gamers won’t have. Here are the FPS numbers from PCs that I tested the game on:

• RTX 3080: 60-80FPS
• RTX 2060: 30-40 FPS
• RTX 4080: 120 FPS

For those who don’t know, Plague Tale is an action-adventure game set in the 14th century. The protagonist is Amicia, a young girl whose brother, Hugo, has been infected. The game follows Amicia as she tries to find a cure for Hugo while avoiding the horrors of the virus. Plague Tale is a unique game that combines elements of stealth and puzzle-solving. The player must use Amicia’s wits and agility to avoid guards and rats.

Enough about the game and its issues; let’s find out how we can fix them.

A Plague Tale Requiem: How To Fix Lag

The System Requirements of this game are high enough to send masses away from it. The minimum requirements are GTX 970 for 1080p on Low Settings, whereas RTX 3070 for 1080p 60 FPS in Ultra settings. This makes Plague Tale Requiem one of the most demanding titles of this year.

Best Graphics Settings

For those who don’t match the hardware requirements will have to sacrifice the beautiful graphics. Here are the best settings for the game:

• Vsync: off
• Screen Resolution: Native resolution of your monitor.
• Resolution Scale: 100%
• Display Mode: Fullscreen
• NVIDIA DLSS Super Resolution: Quality
• Motion Blur: No
• Chromatic Aberration: No
• Draw Distance: Medium
• Shadow Maps: Low
• Volumetric Light: High
• Ambient Occlusion: Medium
• Depth of Field: High
• Contact Shadows: Low
• Light Shafts: Ultra
• Screen-space Reflections: Medium or Low
• Texture Quality: High

Note: Decrease resolution scale was recommended on some forums to increase FPS, but I wouldn’t use it as it makes the game look blurry.

As for DLSS, any setting other than quality will make the game look bad. The performance gains are also significant while using the quality setting. My main PC with RTX 3080 averaged 70-80 FPS, which started touching 100+ FPS after turning DLSS on.

* The game was tested on the latest version of Geforce Game Ready Driver v522.25.

Once you’re done changing the settings, let’s move to the next part.

Change Graphic Control Panel Panel Settings

Here are a few tweaks for both Nvidia and AMD Users that will provide instantly boost your FPS in A Plague Tale Requiem:

For Nvidia Users:

• Open up Nvidia’s Control Panel. Right-click on desktop > click Nvidia control panel
• Click Manage 3D Settings > Program Settings
• Find “A Plague Tale” you can manually add the game if it’s not on the list
• Now, make the following changes:

Monitor Tech: G-Sync (If available)
Maximum Pre-rendered frames: 2
Threaded optimization: On
Power Management: Prefer Maximum Performance
Texture Filtering – Quality:  Performance
Max Frame Rate: 60*
Low Lateny Mode: Low (High or Ultra makes sense only for PvP Games)

Setting Max Frame Rate to 60 will ensure your GPU doesn’t get hot. I have seen people on Reddit and Steam Forums reporting that their GPU temps are spiking up to 82°. Limiting FPS is a great way to minimize GPU load.

For AMD Users

• Anti-Aliasing Mode: Use Application settings
• Anti-aliasing Method: Multisampling
• Morphological Filtering: Off
• Anisotropic Filtering Mode: Use application settings
• Texture Filtering Quality: Performance
• Surface Format Optimization: On
• Wait for V-sync: Off
• OpenGL Triple Buffering: Off
• Shader Cache: AMD optimized
• Tesselation Mode: Override application settings
• Maximum Tesselation Level: Off
• GPU Workload: Graphics
• Chill: On*
• Frame Rate Target Control: Disabled

To lock FPS using AMD Radeon Control Panel, turn Radeon Chill on.

Changing the mentioned settings should increase your FPS a little bit; if you are looking for more gains, continue reading for more traditional tweaks.

Update Your Device Drivers

• Download Nvidia Drivers
• Download AMD Drivers

Do you wonder why you should update your graphic card drivers? It would be good to check on the new updates for two key reasons. Firstly, it’s the only way to ensure you have the latest drivers for your device. The more recent drivers will allow your computer to run every graphics-intensive application and keep up with any technological changes without trailing too far behind.

Nvidia has already pushed an update with optimizations for A Plague Tale Requiem. The updated version if 522.25.

Enable or Disable Game Mode in Windows 10

The new game mode makes gaming on your computer even better. Windows prioritizes its performance when playing a game in game mode and gives it more of the computer’s resources. The game will run faster and smoother, with less lag and interruptions. The game mode also ensures that your computer’s performance won’t be impacted when you’re not playing a game.

To enable game mode, go to Settings > Gaming > Game Mode. Turn this off or on one by one and compare the performance.

Disable in-game overlays

Discord

If you are using Discord like me, I’d recommend changing a few things. One such thing is discord overlay; it’s not something you need at all times. I use a two-monitor setup, so the overlay is useless for me. It is known for causing FPS-related issues.

Disable Hardware Acceleration in Discord

• Open Discord
• Click on User Settings > Appearance
• Click on the Hardware Acceleration radio; this will turn it off.

Disable in-game Discord Overlay

• Open Discord
• Go to Overlay under App Settings
• Click on the “Enable in-game overlay”; this will turn it off.

Windows Game Bar

• Click Start > Settings > Gaming
• On the Game Bar, set “Record game clips, screenshots, and broadcast using Game bar” to off.
• Now head to the Captures tab and set the “Record the background while I’m playing a game” to Off.
• You can also test turning Game Mode on or off, one by one.

Increase Game Priority

Changing game priority is an old-school method of boosting FPS in certain games; this only affects CPU relying Games.

• Press CTLR + Shift + ESC to open the task manager
• Locate A Plague Tale and right-click > go to details
• Now right-click on the process’s .exe file and set the priority to “high.”

This will prioritize your game over other windows applications and give you a little boost.

Fix A Plague Tale Lagging on Windows 11

These steps are specific to Windows 11 users.

Disable Core-Isolation on Windows 11

Core Isolation is a new feature built-in by Microsoft that protects your PC from untrusted applications and drivers. The tradeoff is the performance. But this will not be an issue for anyone who doesn’t download anything from untrusted sites.

Here’s how you can disable it:

• Click on the Start Menu button and select Settings.
• Click Privacy and Security > Windows Security > Device Security.
• Here you will find Core Isolation; click on Core isolation details.

• You will find a “Memory Integrity” radio button on the next screen; turn it off.

You’ve successfully disabled VBS on Windows 11. Many users on Reddit have reported this to significantly improve performance for many games. We’re talking about improvements of about 20-30 fps straightaway.

Enable Game Mode

We’ve noticed considerable improvements in the Game Mode in Windows 11. For Windows 10, we suggest disabling both the Game mode and the game bar, whereas this option should be enabled on Windows 11.

To Enable: Type game mode in search and enable it.

Use Compatibility Settings

Of course, not all the titles are optimized for the new operating system yet. This should change soon. Until then, you can use Windows’s inbuilt compatibility setting. To do so:

• Right-click on the app’s exe file
• Go to properties > Compatibility
• Under Settings, Locate “Disable fullscreen optimizations”, and click on the checkbox
• Also, select “Run this program as an administrator.”
• Click Apply and close the box.

One more thing suggested by Reddit users is doing a clean Windows 11 install rather than upgrading it from Win 10. Also, DX12-optimized games benefit while older ones are taking a hit.

How to fix stuttering in A Plague Tale

Disable Microsoft Device Association Root Enumerator

This is a Microsoft service that used to cause micro stutters in the previous game, it turns out it disabling it also works for Requiem.

To do so:

• Launch Device Manager, and search for it using Windows Search
• Click on Software Devices to expand the list
• Locate “Microsoft Device Association Root Enumerator”> Right-click and disable it as shown in the screenshot below:

Move the game to SSD or faster HDD

A Reddit user reported constant stuttering in Plague Tale Requiem; someone asked him for his specs, and it turns out the guy had an SSD for C Drive, but the game was installed on the 5400 RPM drive. The user had to move his game to the SSD, and the issue was fixed.

As technology continues to evolve, so does the need for better storage. Although hard drives have been around for a while, they are quickly replaced by solid-state drives due to their increased speed and decreased energy consumption. SSDs are more expensive than hard disks but offer many more benefits. On top of the increased speed, they also consume less power. This is a critical reason SSDs are used in many new devices, from smartphones to computers.

Close any memory-hogging applications

Open up the task manager and check your memory and disk usage. Close all applications (non-windows) that are eating your memory and using a disk drive. If you are still stuttering with everything looking fine, you should probably wait for the hotfix update, which should be pushed out shortly.

Several memory-hungry apps can cause high RAM usage in Windows. One of the most notorious offenders is Chrome. Even when minimized, Chrome can take up a lot of system resources. Firefox and Opera also tend to use more RAM than Edge. If you’re experiencing regular crashes or slowdowns, it might be time to check your app’s resource usage and see if any of your favorites are guilty parties.

Use Process Lasso to limit CPU usage.

Process Lasso is software that helps you limit the CPU usage of a particular app. Download the software and use it accordingly. I dropped my CPU usage by almost 20% after using the software. Also, try switching between hyperthreading on/off; this also dramatically improves.

The tweaks and optimizations were tested on PCs with the following configuration:

• i5 8500 with GTX 1060 @1080p
• i3 10300 with RTX 2060 @1080p
• i7 8700 with GTX 1650 @1080p
• AMD Ryzen 5600x with RTX 3080 @2k

References:

• Reddit
• Steam
• Official Developer Forum

I hope these tweaks help you in increasing your FPS. Comment if they did; if you have any issues, drop them in the comment section below.