Possible fix for random poor performance

[Iced Tea]

My specs are RTX 3060, i7 12700, 32 gb of ram and 12 gb of vram. When I installed and ran the game for the first time I had a pretty smooth 75-90 fps during the tutorial and my first mission, but after coming back to the ship I wanted to change up a few graphics settings (the game defaulted to high/ultra with ultra quality upscaling) and pretty much immediately after changing stuff to lower settings my game started struggling to get a stable 40 fps. This persisted after restarting the game/pc multiple times, reverting graphics options to the default and even setting every option to low.

I eventually managed to fix it by uninstalling the game, going to the game's file directory in steamapps/common/ and deleting the game's folder (which after uninstalling still had a bunch of files related to the rootkit anti cheat) and then reinstalling the game.

I'm unsure of why this happens but that was the solution that worked for me and hopefully it will help out some other peeps who run into the same issue. If you're on amd hardware I don't know if this will help with stuttering or crashing but it's worth a shot, and if it works let us know here so people googling this can get a solid answer.

EDIT-TL;DR:

1. Right click and uninstall Helldivers 2 in your steam library

2. Navigate to steamapps/common/ and delete the Helldivers 2 folder

3. Open windows search and type in %appdata%, click on the folder result and go to AppData/Roaming/Arrowhead/Helldivers2

4. Copy the "saves" folder, then delete everything in helldivers2

5. Reinstall the game on steam

6. Go back to the AppData/Roaming/Arrowhead/Helldivers2 folder and paste & replace the "saves" folder to get your custom key bindings back

6a. (optional) Update your video drivers, or roll back to a previous one

Then launch your game and see if this improves your performance at all. You might need to repeat this fix whenever the game decides to randomly tank your frames, which seems to happen after updates to the game or slowly over time. Longest I've gone with this fix working/lasting is about 4 weeks before I had to repeat this "fix".

[thedreddnought]

To be clear, this FIXED your random fps dips? It's steady or at least more steady for you now?

[Iced Tea]

Originally posted by thedreddnought:

To be clear, this FIXED your random fps dips? It's steady or at least more steady for you now?

It gave me back the original performance I had when I first installed the game, which was in the 75-90 fps range. I don't have a 120hz monitor so I play games with vsync on capped at 60 fps which is an acceptable frame rate for me. I'm unsure if this will help anyone who is experiencing significant drops but for me it hasn't gone below 60 so far.

[thedreddnought]

Originally posted by Iced Tea:

Originally posted by thedreddnought:

To be clear, this FIXED your random fps dips? It's steady or at least more steady for you now?

It gave me back the original performance I had when I first installed the game, which was in the 75-90 fps range. I don't have a 120hz monitor so I play games with vsync on capped at 60 fps which is an acceptable frame rate for me so I'm unsure if this will help anyone who is experiencing significant drops but for me it hasn't gone below 60 so far.

I'm going to try this for myself and report back.

[thedreddnought]

Okay, it seems like it may have helped a bit. I was getting 50-60 fluctuations but after the reinstall it seems more like 55-60. I'd love to hear the experience of others that try this.

[Iced Tea]

Originally posted by thedreddnought:

Okay, it seems like it may have helped a bit. I was getting 50-60 fluctuations but after the reinstall it seems more like 55-60. I'd love to hear the experience of others that try this.

Dang, sorry to hear it didn't improve it by a whole lot. What are your PC specs btw? I went from having 35-40 fps on the ship to 80-90 fps after doing this fix so it was a pretty significant improvement on my end.

Hopefully more people will see this and try it for themselves so we can get a better idea of how helpful this is.

[Souma]

Originally posted by thedreddnought:

Okay, it seems like it may have helped a bit. I was getting 50-60 fluctuations but after the reinstall it seems more like 55-60. I'd love to hear the experience of others that try this.

Im gonna try this, I have similar specs of the iced tea but my cpu is amd. medium settings getting around 30fps~ and drops a lot with too much info from the game
edit: no effects here

[Iced Tea]

Originally posted by Souma:

Originally posted by thedreddnought:

Okay, it seems like it may have helped a bit. I was getting 50-60 fluctuations but after the reinstall it seems more like 55-60. I'd love to hear the experience of others that try this.

Im gonna try this, I have similar specs of the iced tea but my cpu is amd. medium settings getting around 30fps~ and drops a lot with too much info from the game
edit: no effects here

Unfortunately AMD hardware seems to have a lot more issues with this game compared to intel/nvidia. It's also very taxing on the CPU in general on top of the gameguard anti cheat impacting performance so I dunno if this fix would help much if you have a weak one.

I'm going on my second day after applying this and I've had a consistent framerate that rarely drops below 60 unless there's a lot of stuff going on on screen.

[Nakomi]

So I had the same issue a few days ago and just saw this post now, I am currently redownloading it and wanted to ask if you after all this, changed any settings.

[1080Puktra]

I'm wonder whats going on with some of these updates because it seems to almost only be effecting NVIDIA & this is the 2nd time it's happened with a update messing with performance and having stuttering while AMD seemed almost completely unaffected by these issues.

[Nakomi]

Originally posted by 1080Puktra:

I'm wonder whats going on with some of these updates because it seems to almost only be effecting NVIDIA & this is the 2nd time it's happened with a update messing with performance and having stuttering while AMD seemed almost completely unaffected by these issues.

Yeah, it seems that with each new update, the performance worsens by 20%

[AnHonestSoul]

Originally posted by Iced Tea:

Originally posted by Souma:

Im gonna try this, I have similar specs of the iced tea but my cpu is amd. medium settings getting around 30fps~ and drops a lot with too much info from the game
edit: no effects here

Unfortunately AMD hardware seems to have a lot more issues with this game compared to intel/nvidia. It's also very taxing on the CPU in general on top of the gameguard anti cheat impacting performance so I dunno if this fix would help much if you have a weak one.

I'm going on my second day after applying this and I've had a consistent framerate that rarely drops below 60 unless there's a lot of stuff going on on screen.

AMD is not to blame when nvidia users have problems as well. We all in the same boat.

The game is not well optimized in general regardless of specs, but its definitely the patch that somehow causes stuttering for everyone.

[Iced Tea]

Originally posted by Nakomi:

So I had the same issue a few days ago and just saw this post now, I am currently redownloading it and wanted to ask if you after all this, changed any settings.

I did change it to fullscreen and turned down some of the more cpu intensive settings, but as others have said the new patches tend to either improve or decrease performance.

Funny enough this latest one did improve my frames by like 10 but it seems the longer I'm playing the worse it gets over time.

[VAL]

I’m going to try this today. I have practically the exact same specs and after the geforce driver update a few days ago my performance crashed. I get about 10 fps during missions on low settings when i would usually have a stable 40-50.

[Dain_Ironfoot]

Originally posted by VAL:

I’m going to try this today. I have practically the exact same specs and after the geforce driver update a few days ago my performance crashed. I get about 10 fps during missions on low settings when i would usually have a stable 40-50.

I rolled back the driver because it started crashing a lot.

[VAL]

Originally posted by VAL:

I’m going to try this today. I have practically the exact same specs and after the geforce driver update a few days ago my performance crashed. I get about 10 fps during missions on low settings when i would usually have a stable 40-50.

It worked! You do need to delete the folder in the steamapps/common directory but I'm back to smooth gameplay :) thanks homie