How to Fix Frame Drops During Barbarian Fights in Carry The Count

Little Bird Studios made a gorgeous little tactical monster with Carry The Count. The resource tracking is nasty in the best way, the combat layers reward people who plan three turns ahead, and the micro-battles have a real ‘one more run’ pull. Then you hit the mid-to-late game, a Barbarian horde spills onto the map, and your buttery 60+ FPS turns into a slideshow.

If that’s you, I feel it. You spend twenty minutes setting up a perfect formation, the fight kicks off, and the game starts hitching like it’s running on a toaster. Your rig isn’t the problem. Barbarian fights are brutal on the engine in ways ordinary skirmishes aren’t.

Threads on Steam, Reddit, and hardware forums keep pointing at the same three suspects: a CPU bottleneck in the simulation, an overwhelmed audio system, and asset streaming hiccups. Here’s why it happens and how to fix it.

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Why Barbarian Fights Wreck Your Performance

A typical skirmish is a handful of units trading blows. A Barbarian encounter throws dozens of bodies at the screen, all running AI, all animating, all firing off special abilities with particle effects. The engine has to juggle a lot at once.

Keep this table in mind. Every fix below targets one of these three rows.

1. The CPU choke. Barbarian AI constantly re-evaluates who to hit and how to reach them. If the engine can’t spread that work across your cores, one core hits 100% and everything waits on it. Your GPU can be bored while your CPU sweats.

2. The audio pile-up. This one gets overlooked. The game mixes every overlapping sound in real time, and when a horde clashes, that mixing can back up and show up as visual stutter.

3. Uncapped frames and slow asset loading. Rendering huge numbers of moving sprites and textures makes your video memory work overtime. Run uncapped, or off a sluggish mechanical drive, and the mismatch causes those ugly micro-freezes.

The Fixes, In Order of ‘Try This First’

Fix 1: Turn Down the Audio Channels

Start here, because it costs you almost nothing and it’s the tweak people are most surprised by.

Open Options, go to the Audio tab, and look for a setting like Audio Channels or Sound Quality. Drop it from High/Max to Medium or Low. If the game gives you an actual slider or number, aim for 32 or 16 channels. Not every build exposes the same options, so if you only see a generic quality setting, lower that.

Why this works: fewer simultaneous sounds means less real-time mixing, and that frees CPU time for the pathfinding that’s actually choking your fight. You’ll barely notice the audio difference in the chaos of a battle, but your frame rate will.

Fix 2: Cap Your Frame Rate at the Driver Level

Running uncapped feels great until a big fight starts and your 1% lows fall off a cliff. A locked frame rate gives you a steadier power draw and more consistent frame pacing.

Nvidia Users

• Right-click the desktop and open Nvidia Control Panel
• Go to Manage 3D Settings, then the Program Settings tab
• Click Add and pick the Carry The Count executable
• Find Max Frame Rate, switch it On, and set it to your monitor’s refresh rate (60, 120, whatever you run)
• Scroll to Power Management Mode and set it to Prefer Maximum Performance

AMD Users

Open AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition, go to Gaming, select the game, and use Frame Rate Target Control (FRTC) or Radeon Chill to lock frames to your display’s native refresh rate.

A stable 60 beats a jumpy 140 every single time, especially in a game where you’re making careful tactical calls.

Fix 3: Trim the Graphics That Don’t Earn Their Keep

Some visual options cost a lot and give you almost nothing when a fight is moving fast. Cut these first:

• Particle Quality and Post-Processing: Set both to Medium or Low. Barbarian warcries and ability hits spawn layers of overlapping effects, and all that alpha blending adds up fast.
• Shadow Quality: Go Medium or Low. I’d keep shadows on rather than killing them entirely, since fully unshaded scenes can cause their own headaches. Lower resolution shadows cut the rendering work for every soldier on the field.
• Motion Blur: Off. It adds judder during camera pans and helps nothing in a top-down tactics game.
• Anti-Aliasing: Swap heavy temporal or multi-sample options for FXAA or CMAA. They’re lighter and look fine here.

Fix 4: Fix the Windows Side of Things

Windows likes to play referee between your game and everything else running in the background. Tell it who’s boss.

1. Find the game’s install folder (usually under steamapps/common in your Steam library path)
2. Right-click the main .exe, choose Properties, open the Compatibility tab, and tick Disable fullscreen optimizations
3. Hit the Start button, search for Graphics Settings, and open it
4. Under Graphics performance preference, click Browse, select the Carry The Count executable, click Options, choose High Performance, and save

This nudges Windows to prioritize the game over background noise so it doesn’t throttle you mid-fight.

Fix 5: Verify Files and Clear the Shader Cache

Stale or corrupted files cause stutter when the engine loads unit assets for the first time in a Barbarian battle. A clean slate fixes a lot of mystery hitching.

Verify the install: In Steam, right-click Carry The Count, open Properties, go to Installed Files (or Local Files), and click Verify integrity of game files. Let it scan and re-download anything broken.

Clear the Nvidia shader cache: Press Windows Key + R, type %localappdata%, and hit enter. Open the Nvidia folder, find DXCache and GLCache, and delete what’s inside. Restart your PC so shaders recompile cleanly. Expect the first fight after this to hitch a bit while the cache rebuilds, then it settles.

Fix 6: Kill the Overlays and Sort Your Power Plan

Overlays hook into your game’s rendering, and that can throw off frame delivery right when you need it smooth.

• Turn off the Discord overlay, Steam overlay, and Nvidia ShadowPlay overlay
• Open Control Panel, go to Hardware and Sound, then Power Options, and pick High Performance or Ultimate Performance
• On a laptop, plug into the wall. Battery mode throttles hard, and no setting in the game will fix that

Still Stuttering? Edit the Config File

If you’ve done everything above and still get the occasional hitch, you can go into the config files directly. Back up anything you edit first.

1. Press Windows Key + R, type %localappdata%, and press enter
2. Look for a folder named after the game or Little Bird Studios
3. Open the Saved and Config folders and look for something like GameUserSettings.ini or a similar plain-text settings file
4. Open it in Notepad and find the VSync line (for example bUseVSync=True). Try setting it to False and handle VSync through your GPU control panel instead
5. Check that any TextureQuality or EffectsQuality lines match the low-overhead presets you want
6. Save, close, right-click the file, open Properties, tick Read-only, and hit Apply so the game doesn’t quietly overwrite your changes

File names and variable names can differ between builds, so don’t panic if yours looks different. If you can’t find these lines, leave the file alone and stick with the in-game and driver settings.

Quick Reference: What To Change

My Take: Is It Worth the Hassle?

Yes, but let’s be honest about something. You shouldn’t have to do all this to play a tactics game. A studio as sharp as Little Bird clearly knows how to build great systems, and the combat in Carry The Count is a blast. Shipping it with Barbarian fights that can tank a decent PC is the one real blemish.

The silver lining is that the audio fix and the frame cap solve the bulk of the pain for most people. If you only do two things, do those. The rest is polish for players chasing rock-solid pacing.

Keep your GPU drivers updated too, and watch for patch notes from the devs. Performance hotfixes tend to land quietly, and one good update could make half this guide unnecessary.

Before a long session, close your extra browser tabs and any streaming apps. Free memory gives the engine room to breathe, and in a game where one bad hitch can wreck a turn, that room matters.

Now go crush that horde without the slideshow.