Helldivers 2’s performance might need to be Arrowhead Games’ next major focus

Just about everything is going swell in the world of Helldivers 2 following the recent major content update, which resolved some of the game’s most pressing issues in one fell swoop. Some outstanding issues do yet exist, however, and Helldivers 2‘s questionable performance is at the top of the list.

Notably, the community has long suspected that something is up with Helldivers 2‘s performance not only on PC, but also the PlayStation 5, and this problem has come to a head with the aforementioned update’s admittedly delightful jungle biome. It would seem that the players’ performance has been on a moderately steady decline from the day Helldivers 2 first came out, and I myself can vouch for this being the case from personal experience. Players have been calling this out for some time now, but what’s enough is enough from the look of things, and Arrowhead may need to focus on resolving this problem before things get even worse.

Helldivers 2’s performance is getting worse and worse, somehow

It would be easy enough to discount an odd case of poor Helldivers 2 performance if threads discussing the problem hadn’t been popping up left and right for months now. On my end, playing the game on the mid-to-high-range 4070/10850K combo, I’ve personally seen Helldivers 2 performance take a steady nosedive from maintaining over 100 FPS in most situations down to sometimes struggling to keep things over 60 FPS when the shooting really gets going. This is at maximum settings at the 3440×1440 resolution, mind, though tweaking things doesn’t seem to do much good when it comes to average FPS numbers. At least, not to the extent one would expect.

Some claim that the brunt of Helldivers 2‘s performance problems came to a head with the mid-April update, though the threads highlighted in the three links featured above suggest that this has been brewing for some time now. Whatever the case may be, it seems self-apparent that something is up, and Arrowhead Games is yet to comment on this particular concern from the community.

I have found some potential “fixes” being thrown out by players dealing with these problems, too. Two of them, in particular, stand out as possibly helpful:

• Clearing your GPU’s shader cache for Helldivers 2.
• Avoiding opening your in-game options menu (as it demonstrably crashes the game’s performance until it’s restarted, for some reason).

The former did not work on my end, for what it’s worth. The latter, however, did, and it’s particularly strange and ridiculous, as this implies you shouldn’t ever open the main Helldivers 2 settings interface if you want your FPS as high as possible. Until Arrowhead Games fixes the problem, at the very least.

Of course, Arrowhead does have some other problems it needs to grapple with, too. The Spear launcher – which is amazing, by the way – is still crashing the game left and right, and there’s no official communication channel for the developers to issue statements to the community. Indeed, Arrowhead is still sticking almost exclusively with its Discord channel for this, which is certainly a choice. So, we’re all going to have to stay tuned on this front, as there’s no telling when and how the performance fix might be dropping in.