Experiencing crippling frame drops right as you swing your bone-whip? The definitive Mina the Hollower AMD lag fix requires disabling Radeon Chill, forcing OpenGL triple buffering in your Adrenalin software, and uncapping the in-game Vsync. Because Yacht Club Games built their retro-inspired engine to run at a razor-sharp 60fps or 120fps, any desync between your Radeon GPU and your monitor will cause aggressive stuttering.
While the game's Game Boy Color-inspired aesthetic might look lightweight, its under-the-hood engine demands absolute precision. When modern graphics cards encounter this kind of low-poly, pixel-perfect rendering, they often misidentify the game as a background task, leading to downclocking and severe performance hits. This guide will walk you through the exact technical steps to force your hardware to respect the game's engine, ensuring your journey across Tenebrous Isle is buttery smooth.
Why You Need a Specific Mina the Hollower AMD Lag Fix
To understand why a game that looks like it belongs in 1999 is bringing your modern rig to its knees, you have to understand how Yacht Club Games engineered their latest title. Mina the Hollower operates on a highly customized, modern framework designed to emulate retro limitations while utilizing modern refresh rates.
When you burrow underground to dodge a Nightshade or unleash a burst of Spark energy, the game calculates physics and hitboxes on a strict frame-by-frame basis. The engine targets either 60fps or 120fps. If your system delivers 59fps or 118fps, the game doesn't just tear visually; it stutters mechanically. The logic of the game is tied to its frame pacing.
AMD Radeon graphics cards, particularly the RX 6000 and RX 7000 series, feature aggressive power-saving protocols. When you launch a AAA title with massive textures, the GPU ramps up its clock speed. But when you launch Mina the Hollower, the AMD driver sees a tiny memory footprint and low shader complexity. The driver assumes the GPU can enter an idle or low-power state. As a result, your core clock speed plummets.
The moment you transition between areas—like the fast screen-slide from the boat dock to the first enemy zone—the game suddenly demands a spike in processing to load the new room's assets. Because your AMD GPU is asleep at the wheel, it misses the delivery window, resulting in the notorious "20fps lock" or a massive half-second stutter. Fixing this requires telling your AMD Adrenalin software to keep the engine running hot, regardless of how retro the game looks.
Step 1: Configuring Adrenalin for the Mina the Hollower AMD Lag Fix
The first and most crucial phase of our Mina the Hollower AMD lag fix takes place inside the AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition. Do not rely on the "Global Graphics" profile. You must create a dedicated profile for the game executable to ensure these aggressive settings don't overheat your card during other tasks.
Open Adrenalin, navigate to the Gaming tab, and select Games. If Mina the Hollower isn't listed, click the three dots in the top right, select "Add a Game," and find the executable in your Steam directory.
Once inside the game's specific profile, apply the following exact settings:
- Radeon Anti-Lag: ON. This reduces input latency, which is critical for a game that relies on split-second burrowing mechanics and parry-focused coffin blocks.
- Radeon Boost: OFF. This dynamic resolution scaler will ruin the pixel-perfect 8-bit aesthetic and cause micro-stutters during fast movement.
- Radeon Chill: OFF. This is the primary culprit for the lag. Chill intentionally drops your framerate when you aren't moving the mouse or mashing buttons. In a controller-based platformer, this causes constant erratic frame pacing.
- Radeon Image Sharpening: OFF. The game has native pixel-scaling; forcing driver-level sharpening adds unnecessary processing overhead.
- Wait for Vertical Refresh (Vsync): Off, unless application specifies. We will handle Vsync inside the game engine.
Next, expand the Advanced section at the bottom of the profile:
- Texture Filtering Quality: Performance.
- Surface Format Optimization: OFF. This older AMD feature tries to swap texture formats to save memory, which often breaks 2D sprite rendering and causes visual glitches on Mina's character model.
- OpenGL Triple Buffering: ON. Yacht Club's engine relies heavily on OpenGL wrappers for cross-platform compatibility. Enabling triple buffering smooths out the delivery of frames to your monitor, eliminating the tearing that occurs when swinging your bone-whip.
By forcing these settings, you prevent the Adrenalin software from applying "smart" optimizations that actively harm retro-style engines.
Step 2: Disabling ULPS to Stop Screen Transition Stutters
If you have applied the Adrenalin settings and are still experiencing lag specifically when the screen slides between zones on Tenebrous Isle, you are likely suffering from the ULPS (Ultra Low Power State) bug. This is a notorious AMD issue where the secondary power states fail to wake up fast enough during rapid 2D scene transitions.
Disabling ULPS is an advanced but necessary step for the ultimate Mina the Hollower AMD lag fix.
There are two ways to do this. The easiest is using MSI Afterburner (which works perfectly with AMD cards):
- Download and install MSI Afterburner.
- Open the Settings (gear icon).
- Under the General tab, scroll down to the "AMD compatibility properties" section.
- Check the box that says "Disable ULPS."
- Click Apply and restart your computer.
If you prefer not to use third-party software, you can disable it via the Windows Registry:
- Press
Win + R, typeregedit, and hit Enter. - Go to
Edit > Findand search forEnableUlps. - Double-click the
EnableUlpsregistry key. - Change the Value Data from
1to0. - Press
F3to find the next instance ofEnableUlpsand change it to0as well. Repeat until the registry search finishes. - Restart your PC.
Disabling ULPS forces your AMD card to maintain a stable voltage floor. When you move from the town hub to a heavily populated monster zone, the GPU won't have to wake up from a deep sleep, ensuring the screen transition remains at a flawless 120fps.
Step 3: In-Game Display Tweaks for Tenebrous Isle
With the hardware and driver levels sorted, we must align the game's internal configuration with your monitor. Mina the Hollower features a dedicated 120fps mode, which is highly recommended if your display supports it. The increased temporal resolution makes dodging beastly bosses significantly easier.
Launch the game and navigate to the Video or Display options from the main menu.
Target Framerate: Set this to 120. If you are on a 60Hz monitor, set it to 60. Do not leave it uncapped or variable. The physics engine is designed to run at these specific intervals. A fluctuating framerate of 85fps will actually feel worse than a locked 60fps due to frame-time variance.
Fullscreen Mode: Ensure you are playing in Exclusive Fullscreen, not Borderless Windowed. Windows 11's Desktop Window Manager (DWM) forces its own Vsync over Borderless applications, which conflicts with AMD FreeSync and causes the exact stuttering we are trying to fix.
In-Game Vsync: Turn this OFF if you have a FreeSync-compatible monitor. Let your monitor handle the refresh rate matching. If you do not have a FreeSync monitor, you must turn this ON to prevent screen tearing, but be aware it may introduce a tiny amount of input lag.
The Particle Effect Problem
As you progress through the game and upgrade your sidearms and trinkets, the screen will fill with complex particle effects—especially when illuminating the omnipresent darkness with Spark energy. If you notice your framerate halving (dropping from 120 to 60, or 60 to 30) during these intense combat moments, it means your GPU is failing to render the alpha-transparent sprites fast enough, and the engine is aggressively stepping down the framerate to maintain sync.
To combat this, ensure that OpenGL Triple Buffering is enabled in Adrenalin (as covered in Step 1). This provides an extra frame buffer in the VRAM, giving the GPU a split-second cushion to render heavy particle explosions without forcing the game engine to drop the framerate.
Step 4: Steam Deck and Handheld PC Considerations
While this guide focuses heavily on desktop AMD GPUs, many players are experiencing these issues on handhelds like the Steam Deck, ROG Ally, or Lenovo Legion Go, all of which run on custom AMD APUs.
If you need a Mina the Hollower AMD lag fix for a handheld device, the logic remains the same: you must stop the device from downclocking.
On the Steam Deck:
- Press the Quick Access Menu (
...button). - Navigate to the Performance tab (battery icon).
- Enable Manual GPU Clock Control.
- Set the GPU clock to a locked 1000MHz or 1200MHz.
Because Mina the Hollower uses very little power, the Steam Deck will naturally try to drop the GPU clock down to 200MHz or 400MHz to save battery. This is too low to handle the sudden asset streaming during screen transitions, causing the exact same stuttering seen on desktop PCs. Locking the clock speed slightly higher guarantees smooth performance without significantly draining your battery.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Why does Mina the Hollower drop to 20fps on my PC? This is usually caused by AMD's Radeon Chill feature or aggressive power-saving states (ULPS) misidentifying the retro pixel-art engine as an idle task. Disabling Radeon Chill and locking your GPU clock speeds will immediately resolve the 20fps lock.
Does this Mina the Hollower AMD lag fix work for the Steam Deck? Yes. The root cause is the same: AMD APU downclocking. On the Steam Deck, you can bypass this by enabling Manual GPU Clock Control in the Performance menu and locking the frequency to at least 1000MHz to handle screen transitions smoothly.
Should I play Mina the Hollower at 60fps or 120fps? If your monitor supports 120Hz, you should absolutely play at 120fps. Yacht Club Games specifically engineered the game to support 120fps, which halves input latency and makes precision platforming, burrowing, and parrying significantly more responsive.
Why does the game stutter when moving to a new screen? The engine uses a sliding screen transition (similar to classic Zelda titles) that rapidly loads new assets into memory. If your GPU is in a low-power state, it cannot process the new room data fast enough. Disabling ULPS via the Windows Registry or MSI Afterburner fixes this delay.
Final Thoughts on Frame Pacing
Yacht Club Games has delivered a masterpiece of retro design, but modern GPU architecture is simply not built to respect lightweight 2D engines out of the box. By taking manual control of your Adrenalin settings, disabling power-saving features, and syncing your display correctly, you eliminate the friction between old-school rendering and new-school hardware. With these tweaks applied, your descent into the frightful world of Tenebrous Isle will be as flawless and fluid as the developers intended.
Sources
- Yacht Club Games Official Steam Updates
- AMD Adrenalin Driver Documentation
- PC Gaming Wiki - Frame Pacing and ULPS Optimization
- Community Bug Reports via r/MinaTheHollower