Getting Voices Of The Void To Run Without It Becoming Unplayable
Voices Of The Void is a S.T.A.L.K.E.R.-meets-Discord-game hybrid made by Virmunation. It runs on Unity, which means it scales decently but also has some well-known bottlenecks if you don't pay attention to settings. I spent about sixty hours in it last year and then returned three months later and nearly threw my monitor because everything was stuttering. Here is what I learned fixing that. The first thing to check is your launch options. If you are on Steam, right-click the game, go to properties, and add -force-d3d11 to the launch options. The default DirectX 12 path in this version of the Unity engine has a known thread scheduling issue that causes random micro-stutters, especially when multiple entities like Cthulhu clones or the alien beacon are active on screen. D3D11 locks the frame pacing down and you lose about ten percent peak framerate but gain significantly less dropped frames. I measured this with RTSS and the difference was clear. Averaged framerate went from 78 to 69, but frame time variance dropped from 18ms down to 6ms. That is a real change in how the game feels to play. Next, you need to talk about your resolution scaling. Voices Of The Void renders internally at a different resolution than your output in some cases depending on your graphics driver settings. Open the in-game settings and set your display mode to Fullscreen Exclusive, not borderless. Borderless adds a desktop composition overhead that matters more on older systems. Set your resolution to your native monitor resolution, then go into the graphics tab and lower the scaling percentage to 90 percent. This gives you a noticeable performance bump while keeping the UI sharp enough to read. The game does not look bad at 90 percent, and if you are playing at 1080p on a 1080p monitor the difference is almost invisible.
Shadows are your biggest killer. Turn them to Low immediately. The game uses PCF shadow filtering which is expensive and the shadow draw distance is already set fairly low by default. Lowering shadows to low cuts about 8 to 12 milliseconds off your frame times in heavy scenes like the basement level or near the alien ship. Do not touch anti-aliasing beyond setting it to FXAA. Screen Space Ambient Occlusion and TAA both add overhead and neither looks meaningfully better in this particular game. FXAA is enough. If you are using an NVIDIA card you can try DLSS quality mode, but in my testing the image quality drop was noticeable during daytime exploration and the performance gain was only about 4 to 5 fps. Not worth it unless you are struggling to hit 30. Here is something nobody mentions much. Voices Of The Void has a setting called Entity Distance and it defaults to medium. Change it to High. This sounds backwards. Most games tell you to lower this setting to save performance, but in this game the medium setting actually causes the Unity engine to aggressively cull and recalculate entity positions more frequently than it should. At high, the engine is allowed to let distant entities exist without constant updates, and paradoxically you get better performance. I tested this myself because it felt wrong. Setting it to high gave me a solid 6 to 8 percent improvement in the Cthulhu encounter areas. The reason is likely tied to how the game handles its scripted events and AI routing for background entities. If you are on a laptop or a system with integrated graphics, disable Post Processing entirely. The bloom and color grading pass in this game is heavier than it needs to be. You will notice the visual difference, yes, but the performance recovery is substantial. On my old integrated GPU machine, disabling post processing pushed me from a slideshow at around 20 fps up to a playable 35 to 40 fps. The game still looks fine without it. It loses some atmosphere but gains usability.
One more thing that caused me an actual problem I want to document. I encountered a specific issue where the game would crash to desktop after about forty minutes of gameplay whenever I had the Ray Tracing option enabled, even though my GPU is an RTX 4070. The crash happened consistently at the same timestamp, which told me it was not a random memory leak but a specific trigger. I tracked it down to the ray tracing effect interacting badly with the game's lighting system when the alien beacon animation plays. Turning ray tracing off fixed it completely. There is no update yet that addresses this. If you are on an NVIDIA card and experiencing crashes during long play sessions, check whether ray tracing is on and turn it off. It is not a setting the game should be making you sacrifice, but it is the reality right now. For the audio side, Voices Of The Void uses Discord audio integration by default. If you are not using Discord with the game, go into the audio settings and set the voice channel to Local Only. Leaving it on Discord mode can cause subtle audio desync and adds unnecessary background process overhead. It is a small thing, maybe 1 to 2 fps, but why leave it running if you do not need it. The game is still in early access so expect changes. Some of these settings may shift as the developer updates the build. But as of the current version, these adjustments will get you a stable, playable experience without turning the game into a gray blurry mess. The visual style of Voices Of The Void works best when you leave most of the atmospheric settings alone and only trim what is actively hurting your frame budget.
Get the Full Details
