Mount & Blade 2 Bannerlord – Fix crashing, fps drops, stuttering and lag

Mount & Blade 2 Bannerlord stuttering lag crashing fps drops fix – Mount & Blade II Bannerlord is an action RPG with strategy elements by TaleWorlds Entertainment. It is a prequel to Mount & Blade: Warband which is a stand-alone expansion pack for the 2008 game Mount & Blade.

Bannerlord takes place 210 years before its predecessor, with a setting inspired by the Migration Period. The fundamental gameplay premise is the same as previous entries in the series: the player builds up a party of soldiers and performs quests on an overhead campaign map, with battles being played out on battlefields that allow the player to personally engage in combat alongside their troops. Bannerlord, however, includes significant improvements to numerous elements of gameplay.

Bannerlord, like Warband, also has a multiplayer component that allows players to engage in combat with each others across a variety of maps and game modes. Overall the game has managed to garner some really good reviews from the community and everyone seems to be enjoying the game so far.

Mount & Blade 2 Bannerlord – Fix crashing, fps drops, stuttering and lag

Now that you know what Mount & Blade 2 Bannerlord is all about, lets go ahead and talk about the performance of the game. Let me start by saying that this game is very poorly optimized. The games eats up CPU like anything and if your processor does not have enough Cores then there is a high chance that you will start experiencing CPU heating issues. But since the game is at Early Access, it might get fixed soon.

Apart from that players are already complaining about performance issues like stutters, freezes, lag, crashes, etc. That is why we decided to come up with a Mount & Blade 2 Bannerlord Performance guide that will show you some simple tweaks that you can try in order to fix the performance issues that you are having.

How to fix crashing, fps drops, stuttering and lag in Mount & Blade 2 Bannerlord – Method #1

Check the Minimum System requirements of Mount & Blade 2 Bannerlord

Though this is a very obvious thing to do, a lot of people actually buy games without checking out the system requirements. This is actually the first thing you should check. So make sure that your system has the ability to handle Bannerlord. Because after taking a look at the minimum system requirements of the game you should be able to tell whether this game is suitable for your system or not.

Lets take a look at System Requirements of Mount & Blade 2 Bannerlord

MINIMUM:

    • Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
    • OS: Windows 7 (64-bit only)
    • Processor: Intel® Core™ i3-8100 / AMD Ryzen™ 3 1200
    • Memory: 6 GB RAM
    • Graphics: Intel® UHD Graphics 630 / NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 660 2GB / AMD Radeon™ HD 7850 2GB
    • Storage: 60 GB available space
    • Additional Notes: Integrated GPUs require additional 2GB of system RAM. These estimates may change during final release.

RECOMMENDED:

    • Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
    • OS: Windows 10 (64-bit only)
    • Processor: Intel® Core™ i5-9600K / AMD Ryzen™ 5 3600X
    • Memory: 8 GB RAM
    • Graphics: NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1060 3GB / AMD Radeon™ RX 580
    • Storage: 60 GB available space

It is easily visible from the system requirements that the game is quite heavy. The minimum requirements state that you at least need an i3-8100, which is in fact a Quad-core CPU and is actually really powerful.

Now the recommended requirements are completely on a different level. So it looks like you need an i5-9600K or a Ryzen 5 3600X to play Mount & Blade 2 Bannerlord at Max Settings at 1080p 60 FPS. That is really high if you ask me. No wonder processors are generating so much heat while running this game.

The situation is worse if you are a laptop user. If you are using a Integrated GPU then you actually need 8GB RAM to even run this game.

How to fix crashing, fps drops, stuttering and lag in Mount & Blade 2 Bannerlord – Method #2

Update your Graphics Card drivers

If you are facing crashes then that might be because of your outdated graphics drivers. Though Nvidia and AMD have not released drivers specially for Mount & Blade 2 Bannerlord, it is wise to use the latest ones. Here are the links:

  1. Nvidia Drivers
  2. AMD Drivers

How to fix crashing, fps drops, stuttering and lag in Mount & Blade 2 Bannerlord – Method #3

Nvidia Control Panel settings for Mount & Blade 2 Bannerlord

The first thing you should do is click on ‘Adjust image settings with preview‘ located on the left side under 3D settings and make sure that ‘Use the advanced 3D image settings‘ is selected. Now:

  • Open Nvidia Control Panel
  • Click on Manage 3D settings on the left bar
  • Click on Global Settings
  • Now tweak the following settings:
    Image Sharpening : Off
    Threaded Optimization : On
    Power Management : Prefer Maximum Performance
    Low Latency Mode : Off
    Texture filtering – Quality : Performance

If you are using Nvidia GeForce Experience then turn off the in-game overlay. Here is how to do it:

  • Launch GFE
  • Click on the Settings icon located at the top-right corner
  • Click on General
  • And just turn off In-Game Overlay

How to fix crashing, fps drops, stuttering and lag in Mount & Blade 2 Bannerlord – Method #4

Best Graphics Settings for Mount & Blade 2 Bannerlord

Here are the best graphics or video settings for Mount & Blade 2 Bannerlord:

Go to Options > Video

  • Display Mode : Fullscreen
  • Screen Resolution : Desktop Resolution
  • Resolution Scale : 100
  • Frame Limiter : 60
  • V-Sync : None
  • Sharpen Amount : 0.00

Now go to the Performance tab

  • Battle Size : 500
  • Overall : Custom
  • Shader Quality : Low
  • Test Streaming Budget : Medium
  • Shadow Quality : Low
  • Texture Quality : Medium
  • Shadow Type : None
  • Shadow Filtering : PCF
  • Particle Detail : Low
  • Foliage Quality : Low
  • Character Detail : Medium
  • Environment Detail : Medium
  • Terrain Quality : Medium
  • Number of Ragdolls : 3
  • Occlusion Method : TSAO
  • Texture Filtering : Anisotropic 2X
  • Water Quality : Medium
  • Anti-aliasing : None
  • Lighting Quality : High
  • Decal Quality : Low
  • Depth of Field : Off
  • Screen Space Reflection : Off
  • Cloth Simulation : Off
  • Interactive Grass : Off
  • Sun Shafts : On
  • Subsurface Scattering : On
  • Tesselation : Off
  • Bloom : Off
  • Film Grain : Off
  • Motion Blur

Now a lot of you might be thinking that all we did is set everything to low or medium and turned everything off. Yes, you are right, that is exactly what we did. This game is so poorly optimized that our low-end gaming consisting of GTX 1050ti, i3 9100F and 16GB RAM, was having a really hard time running Bannerlord. So we had no other option.

How to fix crashing, fps drops, stuttering and lag in Mount & Blade 2 Bannerlord – Method #5

AMD Control Panel Settings for Mount & Blade 2 Bannerlord (Radeon users)

Click on Global Graphics.

  • Radeon Anti-Lag : Disabled
  • Radeon Boost : Disabled
  • Image Sharpening : Off
  • Anti-Aliasing Mode : Use Application settings
  • Anti-aliasing Method : Multi-sampling
  • Morphological Filtering : Off
  • Anisotropic Filtering : Disabled
  • Texture Filtering Quality: Performance
  • Surface Format Optimization: Enabled
  • Tesselation Mode: AMD Optimized
  • Wait for V-sync: Off
  • OpenGL Triple Buffering: Off
  • Shader Cache: AMD optimized
  • Maximum Tesselation Level: Off
  • GPU Workload: Graphics
  • Radeon Chill: Off
  • Frame Rate Target Control: Disabled

How to fix crashing, fps drops, stuttering and lag in Mount & Blade 2 Bannerlord – Method #6

Verify the game files of Mount & Blade 2 Bannerlord on Steam

You can actually verify the in-game files of Mount & Blade 2 Bannerlord to check whether your system is missing any files that might be causing the game to crash or freeze:

  • Go to your Steam Library
  • Right click on Mount & Blade 2 Bannerlord
  • Select Properties
  • Click on the Local Files tab
  • Click on Verify Integrity of Game Files

How to fix crashing, fps drops, stuttering and lag in Mount & Blade 2 Bannerlord – Method #7

Buggy Windows 10 updates

Microsoft released an update for Windows 10 few days ago called KB4535996. The KB4535996 cumulative update for Windows 10 heavily buggy and is causing a lot of problems for Windows users. In order to know whether your PC is already running the update:

  • Go to Windows Settings
  • Click on Update and Security
  • Click on View update history

If you see an update called KB4535996. You have to uninstall it.

On the Update History window only you will notice the option Uninstall updates on top. Click on it and from the list of updates installed select the one you want to uninstall. Right click on it and click on Uninstall.


Those are all the fixes we have for Mount & Blade 2 Bannerlord at the moment. One thing you have to keep in mind that this game is still in Early Access and will keep on getting updates frequently. It is true that the game is not properly optimized at the moment but the developers are already aware of the issues and are working to fix them.

If you visit the Official Mount & Blade 2 Bannerlord Forums, then you will be surprised to see that how many players are actually experiencing these issues. With that being said we will keep on updating this article with the latest fixes.

If you think this guide had helped you then let us know in the comment section below. Also, If you are facing problems that are not mentioned on this article then also you can comment below. We will try come out with a fix. Good luck!


That’s all folks!

Last Updated on June 20, 2020