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The latest Helldivers 2 PC patch has got PC players begging for performance optimizations on Reddit and the Steam Community forum. Even though performance isn’t directly addressed in the latest patch, it seems that some players are reporting worsening conditions with little explanation.
These ongoing issues aren’t targeting any specific piece of hardware, meaning even if you have one of the best graphics cards, you might experience a downturn in performance since the latest Helldivers 2 patch arrived late last week. In fact, despite upgrading my GPU since I last played, my performance has also taken a hit, which I detail below.
When checking the Helldivers Reddit, it becomes clear that players are struggling with the performance of the game on PC, given that 12 posts have gone live in the last 24 hours, describing issues with PC performance, with far more going live just after the update dropped on March 25.
This is mirrored over on the Steam Community post, where players are venting frustrations over what is commonly being called “performance degradation.” This is the idea that after each major update, PC performance gets worse and worse.
While there is no publicly gathered data to suggest that the PC performance of Helldivers 2 is actively getting worse, the concerns of players carry considerable weight. When taking a closer look at player complaints, I noticed that a lot of them were using gaming laptops, but shortly after the update was released, there were plenty of high-end desktop players struggling too.
I dropped back into Helldivers 2 after almost a year to check out the performance, leaving my settings exactly how they were when I initially compiled the best Helldivers 2 settings, only on a better graphics card (RTX 4070 compared to RTX 3070), and found that performance has absolutely gotten worse.
When originally testing at 1440p, I would get an average frame rate of 76fps, with a 55fps 1% low. Despite upgrading to the RTX 4070, the frame rate has improved to 94.3fps, but the 1% lows have dropped to 29fps, while the 0.2% is a dismal 5.3fps. You can feel this in the moment-to-moment gameplay, too. There are clear moments where the game grinds to a halt, or stuttering gradually gets worse, specifically as I entered combat, before smoothing out again after 10-15 seconds.
One ongoing complaint from PC players is about the lack of Nvidia DLSS or AMD FSR upscaling, largely because the default anti-aliasing and resolution scaling in the game results in a very blurry image. This was also a hot topic when Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt stated that “gameplay > cool tech” in reference to calls for the upscaling tech to be included as it has become a basic feature in games.
For now, Helldivers 2 and its mysterious PC performance issues remain unsolved, so let’s hope Arrowhead comes out with a specific patch to address (or even acknowledge) them.
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