Pollex Keep the Pin Stable

Pollex is built in Unreal Engine 5. The Steam minimum GPU is a GTX 1070. That combination can look good at 1080p if you are ruthless with extras, or it can hitch the first time a crowd mesh streams in. This page is a day-one settings plan. Slider names may change; the priorities will not.

Read system requirements first. If you are below the floor, this page cannot save you.

Goals, in order

1. No hitch during a pin. Better a 60 FPS cap that holds than a 120 FPS average that dips to 12.
2. Readable hands. Motion blur, film grain, and chromatic aberration hide tells. See how to win.
3. A camera you can live with. Controls covers sensitivity; here we cover head-bob and frame pacing.

Day-one preset (1080p, 1070-class)

Until we see the real menu, use this order of cuts:

• Cap FPS to 60 or to your monitor’s floor, whichever is lower.
• Turn off motion blur, depth of field, and film grain if they exist.
• Shadows: medium. UE5 virtual shadows are expensive.
• Global illumination / Lumen: low or off if a toggle exists. The pit is already dark; you need stability more than bounce light.
• Reflections: low.
• Foliage: irrelevant underground — if a slider exists, low.
• Textures: high if you have 8 GB VRAM (1070), medium if you hitch on load.
• Upscaler: if TSR, DLSS, or FSR ships, start on quality, not performance, so the thumb edge stays sharp.

Then play one calibration match from getting started. If the frame graph (Steam overlay) dives when the crowd yells, drop shadows again before you drop resolution.

CPU and RAM hygiene

Close browsers. 16 GB is the minimum, not a luxury. Discord overlay has caused hitches in other UE5 titles; test with it off. Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling in Windows is a coin flip — change one thing at a time.

Play on an SSD. A 4 GB install on a dying HDD will stutter when the next tunnel streams. Leave free space so Windows is not paging during a pin.

Laptop power

Plug in. Set the GPU to high performance. Disable aggressive thermal capping if you can do it without melting the chassis. A 1070-named laptop SKU is still not a desktop 1070.

After a crash

Verify the game files in Steam. Check that controls did not reset. If Steam Cloud is on, wait for the cloud dialog so you do not overwrite a good save with a crash save. Then do not immediately restake; that is a match plan abort condition.

What we will not recommend

• Third-party “UE5 unlockers.”
• Editing engine.ini from a random pastebin before anyone has the files.
• Running at 4K on a 1070 “because upscalers.”
• Benchmarks invented from other games.

When the client exists, we will replace this with named sliders and, if needed, a screenshot. Until then, the roadmap will note if the spec changes, and the review will note if the game is even worth the electricity.

Related: tools hub, how to survive, official links.