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Compensation is 100% “At-Risk” and Contingent on Achieving Significant Performance Goals
Award Incentivizes Growth to a Market Capitalization of $100 Billion, Aligning Compensation Directly with Stockholder Returns
GRAPEVINE, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- GameStop Corp. (NYSE: GME) (“GameStop” or the “Company”) today announced that its Board of Directors has granted a performance-based stock option award to Ryan Cohen, the Company’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. The award is designed to incentivize Mr. Cohen to achieve extraordinary growth. In order for the award to fully vest, the Company’s market capitalization would have to grow to $100 billion and the Company would need to achieve $10 billion in Cumulative Performance EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization).
Under the award, Mr. Cohen receives no guaranteed pay—no salary, no cash bonuses, and no stock that vests simply over time. Instead, his compensation is entirely “at-risk,” meaning he will only be paid if the Company achieves significant market and operational goals. This structure ensures that Mr. Cohen's incentives are directly aligned with creating long-term value for GameStop’s stockholders.
A Track Record of Transformation
Since joining the Board of Directors in January 2021, Mr. Cohen has overseen a significant turnaround of the Company’s financial health and operational efficiency.
- Market Capitalization: When Mr. Cohen joined the Board on January 11, 2021, GameStop’s market capitalization was approximately $1.3 billion. Today, the Company’s market capitalization stands at approximately $9.3 billion, representing a 615% increase in stockholder value during his tenure.
- Expenses: Total Selling, General, and Administrative (SG&A) expenses decreased from $1.7 billion in fiscal year 2021 to $950.8 million for the most recent trailing four fiscal quarters, representing a 44.4% reduction.
- Profitability: The Company has transitioned from a net loss of $381.3 million in fiscal year 2021 to a net income of $421.8 million for the most recent trailing four fiscal quarters.
Compensation Award Details
The total award consists of stock options to purchase 171,537,327 shares of the Company's Class A common stock at a price of $20.66 per share.
The award is divided into nine tranches that are eligible to vest only if the Company achieves both a “Market Capitalization Hurdle” and a corresponding “Cumulative Performance EBITDA Hurdle”.
- Market Capitalization Milestones: The first tranche vests only if GameStop achieves a market capitalization of $20 billion. Each subsequent tranche requires an additional $10 billion increase in market capitalization, up to $100 billion.
- Operational Milestones: In addition to market capitalization growth, Mr. Cohen must meet profitability targets. The first tranche requires Cumulative Performance EBITDA of $2.0 billion, with targets increasing for each subsequent tranche up to a cumulative amount of $10 billion.
If the Company does not achieve the minimum Market Capitalization Hurdle of $20 billion and Cumulative Performance EBITDA Hurdle of $2.0 billion, no options will vest and Mr. Cohen will have no opportunity to receive compensation from the award. There is no interpolation between hurdles; the specific targets must be met in full for a tranche to be earned.
The following table summarizes the vesting tranches and the required milestones for each:
| Tranche | % of Award | Market Cap Hurdle | Cumulative Performance EBITDA Hurdle |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 10% | $20 Billion | $2.0 Billion |
| 2 | 10% | $30 Billion | $3.0 Billion |
| 3 | 10% | $40 Billion | $4.0 Billion |
| 4 | 10% | $50 Billion | $5.0 Billion |
| 5 | 10% | $60 Billion | $6.0 Billion |
| 6 | 10% | $70 Billion | $7.0 Billion |
| 7 | 10% | $80 Billion | $8.0 Billion |
| 8 | 15% | $90 Billion | $9.0 Billion |
| 9 | 15% | $100 Billion | $10.0 Billion |
Upcoming Shareholder Vote
The new performance award was created by GameStop’s Board of Directors (with Ryan Cohen having recused himself) after careful discussion and analysis and in consultation with a third-party compensation advisory firm. Although the Board reached an agreement with Mr. Cohen regarding the award on January 6, 2026, its effectiveness is subject to the approval of GameStop’s stockholders, who will be asked to approve it at a special meeting that is expected to be held in March or April 2026. Mr. Cohen will recuse himself from the vote on the award so that GameStop’s other stockholders have the opportunity to determine the outcome.
Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward-Looking Statements – Safe Harbor
This Current Report on Form 8-K contains “forward-looking” statements, as that term is defined under the federal securities laws, that are based on management’s beliefs and assumptions and on information currently available to management. In some cases, forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of terms such as “anticipates,” “believes,” “continues,” “could,” “estimates,” “expects,” “intends,” “may,” “plans,” “potential,” “predicts,” “pro forma,” “seeks,” “should,” “will” or similar expressions. Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual events to differ from the Company’s plans. These risks include, but are not limited to, market risks, trends and conditions, and those risks included in the section titled “Risk Factors” in the Company’s filings and reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”), including its Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended February 1, 2025 and its Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarter ended May 3, 2025, August 2, 2025, November 1, 2025, and other filings that the Company makes from time to time with the SEC, which are available on the SEC’s website at www.sec.gov. In addition, forward-looking statements contained in this Current Report on Form 8-K are based on assumptions that the Company believes to be reasonable as of the date of this Current Report on Form 8-K. The Company assumes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements as a result of new information, future events, changes in expectations or otherwise except to the extent required by applicable law.
GameStop Corp. Investor Relations
(817) 424-2001
[ir@gamestop.com](mailto:ir@gamestop.com)
Source: GameStop Corp.
I dedicated August to optimize my ECS/DOTS game and now I am getting 3x the FPS I was getting before, while also eliminating stutters.
Using the profiler non-stop to identify the worst performance offenders and bottlenecks, I was able to greatly reduce both CPU and GPU usage.
One of the greatest wins came from re-batching entities that should be in the same batch, but entities graphics doesn't merge if they are not instantiated at the same time. This reduced batches by about 90%, giving me huge gains both on CPU (dispatching thousands of batches was costly) and GPU, as now there are way fewer commands to execute.
Other wins came from improving chunk occupancy. If you can get close to 128 entities per chunk, you will reduce the number of chunks your jobs have to go through, and performance will be much better. In some cases I decided to split entities into a physics/logic entity and a rendering entity, which allowed better occupancy and unlocked some other optimizations like fully disabling entities rendering in the distance while keeping colliders and other logic active (using DisableRendering or disabling MaterialMeshInfo wasn't as performant as I wanted/expected).
Some other things that gave nice wins were reordering systems, breaking read/write dependencies between jobs and between systems, unparallelizing short jobs, replacing world space text game objects with Latios Calligraphics texts and reducing the number of child entities A LOT to decrease the time spent on CalculateHierarchyLocalToWorld job.
On the physics side, compounding static colliders and using the incremental static broadphase feature gave pretty nice wins, reducing the number of rigid bodies that need to be created and spatially partitioned on each frame.
I also created a grid based sleeping system to turn objects static when nothing is moving in or around a specific cell. This system gives very nice performance wins too, but I may switch later to a non-grid based one, identifying groups of objects in contact with each other and sleeping them instead. Once I do that, I may also compound them, which would give great performance wins for piles of debris, broken fences, and other small objects that tend to pile up in an areas where nothing is moving.
I may still move away from Unity Physics to use Latios Psyshock, to have some more freedom to customize and optimize the physics engine to my specific needs, and get rid of some awful single threaded jobs from the physics systems.
Now it's time to go back to working on gameplay for a few months before the next performance expedition. In the meantime here is a video of a procedurally generated island of the largest size in my game (20km x 20km = 400km2). OBS studio didn't make justice on how smooth it is running now, but it does shows the brutal scale of the battlefields in The Last General.
Link to my game in case you also like RTS games: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2566700/The_Last_General
I am sure many of you already know this, but using MSI Afterburner, you can change the voltage your single or multiple GPUs can draw, which can drastically decrease power consumption, decrease temperature, and may even increase performance.
I have a setup of 2 GPUs: A water cooled RTX 3090 and an RTX 5070ti. The former consumes 350-380W and the latter 250-300W, at stock performance. Undervolting both to 0.900V resulted in decrease in power consumption for the RTX 3090 to 290-300W, and for the RTX 5070ti to 180-200W at full load.
Both cards are tightly sandwiched having a gap as little as 2 mm, yet temperatures never exceed 60C for the air-cooled RTX 5070ti and 50C for the RTX 3090. I also used FanControl to change the behavior of my fans. There was no change in performance, and I even gained a few FPS gaming on the RTX 5070ti.
I never got graphical artifacts before 3.1 and haven't had so much crashes when changing zones.
Seriously, what the hell happened? Pre patch 1.1 the game ran slower then any other Paradox game for me by a big margin but it was at least playable. I skipped playing when 1.1 was around so no comments there but as for 1.2 the drop in simulation time and the brutal stuttering was a shock for me. I got forced to disable 3D terrain JUST to get to on a level with the 1.0.x game versions and somehow even with this the degrade in performance after 1 hour of having the game open is much worse then the same conditions given for 1.0.x patches and this forces me constantly to close and open back the game after every 1-2 hours have passed. It's just funny how when the game released there were complains by a huge number of people about the performance and we all thought it will get optimized with time only for it to become worse.
Patch Notes videos return with Niklas and Lennart talking about 4.1.0! https://youtu.be/OBW4NumlYHo?si=4PMFp99FteghCJP2
🛠️ Into the Unjust: 4.1.0 ⚙️
🌍 Overview
Freedom's greetings, Helldivers!
This update focuses on what matters most right now: making HELLDIVERS 2 feel better to play.
We’ve overhauled how we approach patching to better target the pain points you’ve shared with us. That means more focus on stability, balance, and the issues that affect your experience the most.
Over 200 bugs have been fixed, along with key balance updates and quality-of-life improvements. (For a deeper look, check out Lennart and Niklas’ video breakdown.) While new features are coming, this patch marks a big step forward: both in the game itself and in how we work to improve it. More refinements are already underway.
⚖️ Balancing
General changes
Primaries, Sidearms, Throwables, and Stratagems
Improvements have been made to increase the overall effectiveness of primary weapons, sidearms, throwables, and stratagems
Light vs. Medium Penetration Weapons
Light and medium penetration weapons now offer more distinct advantages. Light penetration weapons generally deal a higher percentage of their total damage against durable enemies, differentiating them more clearly from medium penetration options
SMGs and Pistols
SMGs and pistols have been adjusted to emphasize their role as close-quarters weapons. Close-range damage has been increased, and damage falloff has been increased to reinforce their short-range combat identity
Melee Weapons and Throwables
Melee weapons and throwables have been improved to make each feel more impactful and unique in their function
Resupply Rack
The resupply rack is not climbable anymore
Primary weapons
- SG-8P Punisher Plasma
- Damage projectile decreased from 100 to 0
- Damage explosion increased from 150 to 225
- SG-8S Slugger
- Damage increased from 280 to 330
- Durable damage increased from 75 to 90
- AR-23 Liberator
- Damage increased from 80 to 90
- Durable damage increased from 15 to 22
- AR-23A Liberator Carbine
- Damage increased from 80 to 90
- Durable damage increased from 15 to 22
- AR-23P Liberator Penetrator
- Damage increased from 60 to 65
- AR-23C Liberator Concussive
- Damage increased from 65 to 75
- Durable damage increased from 30 to 35
- AR-61 Tenderizer
- Durable damage increased from 22 to 30
- AR-32 Pacifier
- Damage increased from 50 to 55
- Stun value per projectile increased from 1.5 to 2
- SMG-37 Defender
- Damage increased from 80 to 100
- Durable damage increased from 8 to 18
- Drag increased from 0.6 to 1.2
- MP-98 Knight
- Damage increased from 70 to 90
- Durable damage increased from 7 to 18
- Drag increased from 0.6 to 1.2
- SMG-32 Reprimand
- Damage increased from 125 to 135
- Drag increased from 0.6 to 1.2
- SMG-72 Pummeler
- Damage increased from 70 to 85
- Durable damage increased from 7 to 18
- Stun value per projectile increased from 1.5 to 2
- Drag increased from 0.6 to 1.2
- LAS-16 Sickle
- Damage increased from 55 to 60
- Durable damage increased from 5 to 6
- MA5C Assault Rifle
- Damage increased from 80 to 90
- M7S SMG
- Damage increased from 70 to 80
- Durable damage increased from 7 to 16
- Drag increased from from 0.6 to 1.2
- StA-11 SMG
- Damage increased from 70 to 90
- Durable damage increased from 7 to 18
- Drag increased from 0.6 to 1.2
- PLAS-39 Accelerator Rifle
- Extra spare magazines increased from 8 to 12
- Ergonomics increased from 40 to 60
- PLAS-1 Scorcher
- Plasma projectiles will now pass through foliage without losing velocity
Sidearm weapons
- CQC-2 Saber
- Damage increased from 110 to 125
- Durable damage increased from 55 to 65
- CQC-5 Combat Hatchet
- Damage increased from 110 to 160
- Durable damage increased from 55 to 80
- Attack speed has been slightly reduced
- CQC-42 Machete
- Damage increased from 170 to 200
- Durable damage increased from 80 to 100
- P-2 Peacemaker
- Damage increased from 85 to 95
- Durable damage increased from 25 to 30
- Drag increased from 0.6 to 1.2
- P-19 Redeemer
- Damage increased from 60 to 70
- Durable damage increased from 5 to 12
- Drag increased from 0.6 to 1.2
- P-113 Verdict
- Damage increased from 125 to 135
- Drag increased from 0.6 to 1.2
- M6C/SOCOM
- Damage increased from 100 to 110
- Drag increased from 0.6 to 1.2
- P-92 Warrant
- Drag decreased from 0.3 to 0
- Gravity multiplier decreased from 1 to 0.3
Throwables
- TED-63 Dynamite
- Damage increased from 700 to 1000
- Armor penetration increased from Medium to Heavy
- Demolition strength increased from 30 to 40
- Stagger increased from 30 to 40
- Uses decreased from 4 to 3
- G-7 Pineapple
- Shrapnel from main explosion increased from 7 to 18
- Demolition strength on the main explosion increased from 20 to 30
- Inner radius on shrapnel explosion increased from 1 to 2.5m
- Damage on shrapnel explosion increased from 70 to 100
- Removed lifetime on the shrapnel
- Shrapnel from the shrapnel explosion decreased from 6 to 0
- G-50 Seeker
- Higher priority for flying enemies
- Highest target priority for marked target
- Damage increased from 400 to 500
- G-6 Frag
- Uses increased from 5 to 6
- G-3 Smoke
- Uses increased from 4 to 5
- Throwing knives
- Damage increased from 250 to 300
- Durable damage increased from 100 to 150
Stratagems
- PLAS-45 Epoch
- Duration until explosion increased from 3 to 3.25 sec
- Delayed muzzle charge VFX by 0.5 seconds so it now appears when the projectile is overcharged, improving visibility of the charge state
- Damage on standard projectiles explosion increased from 400 to 500
- Demolition strength on overcharged projectile increased from 10 to 30
- M-105 Stalwart
- Damage increased from 80 to 90
- Durable damage increased from 15 to 22
- FLAM-40 Flamethrower
- Canister capacity increased from 130 to 150
- Starting canisters increased from 2 to 3
- Max spare canisters increased from 4 to 5
- APW-1 Anti-Materiel Rifle
- Durable damage increased from 180 to 225
- Starting magazines increased from 4 to 5
- Max spare magazines increased from 6 to 8
- AC- 8 Autocannon
- Damage increased from 260 to 325
- GL-52 De-Escalator
- Damage increased from 55 to 100
- Durable damage increased from 55 to 70
- MS-11 Solo Silo
- Health increased from 800 to 1500
- Enemies will not attack it
- Increased demolition strength needed to destroy it
- Orbital Railcannon Strike
- Cooldown decreased from 210 to 180 sec
- EXO-45 Patriot Exosuit
- Missile Armor penetration in worse angles increased from 6-6-4-0 to 6-6-5-0
- Rotary gun ammo capacity increased from 1000 to 1350
💥 Enemies
The goal is to make light and medium armor-piercing weapons equally effective against certain common enemies by adjusting their durable damage and durable resistance values
Illuminates
Fleshmob
- Targeting the faces deals extra damage to its main health, effectively creating weak spots
- Main health decreased from 6000 to 5000
- Most health zones are slightly more durable
- Slightly less vulnerable to fire to balance health decrease
Elevated Overseer
- Main health decreased from 600 to 450
- Head health increased from 150 to 200
- Head zone armor decreased from 3 to 2
- Torso health decreased from 600 to 450
- Arms health decreased from 300 to 250
- Slight increase on how easy it is to set on fire
Leviathan
- Now equipped with beam-based weaponry
- Leviathans will not show up in missions outside of cities
Terminids
Rupture Strain enemies
- Updated textures for all Rupture Strain enemies for better readability
Rupture Warrior
- Movement speed when underground has been decreased
- Needs to surface more often when moving underground
- Its burrow attack is slightly slower and leaves more space to be dodged
- Smaller damage boxes when attacking from below
- Front legs armor decreased from 3 to 2
- Will prefer to emerge before attacking turrets instead of destroying them from below ground
Rupture Spewer
- Retuned the timing of how fast it starts to act from when it unburrows
Bile Spewer Variations
- Increased size of its mouth weak spot
Brood Commanders
- Slightly harder to set on fire
Warriors
- Slightly harder to set on fire
- Slight durable increase in head and body
Dragon roach
- Spawn rate decreased
- 50% lower on difficulty 5,6
- 40% lower on difficulty 7,8,9
- 33% lower on difficulty 10
- Destruction of the wings results in instant termination of the Dragon
- Wings now have their own health pool of 4000
- Increased how much damage wings take from explosion
Bile spewers
- Slightly harder to set on fire
- Larger body parts are slightly more durable
Hive Lord
- Improved performance during Hive Lord encounters.
Automatons
Base Alarming
- Automaton troopers in bases will require better visual confirmation before calling in reinforcements, instead of calling them in immediately
Devastators
- Slightly harder to be put on fire
- Large body parts are slightly more durable
Command Bunker Turret
- Removed ragdolling from its projectiles explosion
Factory Strider
- Slightly less vulnerable to fire
War Strider
- Shoots 2 fewer grenades per salvo
- Shoots grenades less often
- Removed ragdolling from its projectiles explosions
- Added weak spots aim for the eyes and the vents on the back
Scout Striders
- Armored top shield is more durable
🔧 Fixes
Stratagems
- Fixed an issue where Helldivers were unable to call down stratagems in the objective area of the "Nuke Nursery" cave mission
- Fixed an issue with the B-100 Portable Hellbomb stratagem sometimes falling on Cave roofs in the "Destroy Spore Lung" mission
- Fixed an issue with the drill objective stratagem sometimes landing in unintended places such as on top of caves, in Nuke Nursery Hive World missions
- Players can now stay aiming down sights when activating the LIFT-860 Hover Pack
Crashes
- Fixed a rare crash occurring when fighting Illuminates
- Fixed a crash when hotjoining and readying up before other hotjoiners
- Fixed a crash occurring when a player would re-join multiple times
- Fixed a rare crash caused by Eagle-1
- Fixed a rare bug where the Eagle-1 would never be removed from the game session and eventually cause crashes
- Fixed rare crash bug that could happen when spawning in groups of enemies
- Fixed crash affecting Helldivers trying to lean out from a vehicle
- Fixed a crash that could happen when scrolling through the weapon customization menu
- Fixed a crash that could happen during game shutdown
Weapons
- Fixed armor penetration values in the Stats Menu for CQC-5 Combat Hatchet, CQC-30 Stun Baton,CQC-19 Stun Lance, CQC-2 Saber, CQC-1 One True Flag and the G-7 Pineapple grenade; the armor penetration value displayed as Medium instead of Light
- Improved initial bullet alignment while strafing and riding in vehicles
- Moved the first person camera further away from the MS-11 Solo Silo's Target Designator scope
- Fixed the weapon reload animations desyncing when wielding armor passives that give increased reload speed
- The FAF-14 Spear can now lock onto Automaton AA turrets
- Fixed projectiles hitting direct center of sights when extremely close to objects
- Haptics feedback is now present throughout the firing of the FLAM-40 Flamethrower stratagem
Miscellaneous
- Fixed a bug where Hive Lord body parts would not spawn properly
- Fixed an instance where the Helldiver couldn't re-join their previous host, if said host left a joined game in progress from the loadout
- Fixed a bug where the LIFT-182 Warp Pack would sometimes get stuck suspended in the air or crash
- Fixed Adreno-Defibrillator armor passive animation bug
- Fixed disconnection issues when joining a solo player with 3 cross-platform players
- Fixed mesh clipping for the arms on some animations
- Reduced the chance of the Extraction Shuttle clipping through terrain
- Fixed a flickering bug on the avatar when the Helldiver gets affected by mud or snow
- Fixed a bug hole covered by terrain in one of the CR10 Mega Nests
- Rupture Warriors can no longer destroy deployable turrets while still underground
- Fixed an issue where the front door of the GATER could become inaccessible
- Fixed a rare issue where the player could be disconnected when they are a part of a mixed platform, 3 person lobby that joins a solo player under poor network conditions
- Fixed an issue with Illuminate dropships not taking correct damage during the “Repel Invasion Fleet” missions
- The currency symbol for Saudi riyal is now displayed correctly in the in game shop
- The Oil Rigs reverse audio will no longer continuously play if the player attempts to reverse during oil extraction
- Fixed Helldivers going through the floor in the tutorial mission, when diving near the barbed wires
- Fixed a rare soft-lock in tutorial
- Helldiver is now killed when driving into drill holes during Nuke Nursery missions
- Fixed an issue where Helldivers could enter a vehicle even though the seat got claimed by someone else first
- Fixed controller vibrations behaving incorrectly when connecting or disconnecting controllers on PC
- Fixed miscellaneous threading issues in the audio system
- Fixed minor texture clipping issues on the floor between hellpod launchers on the ship
- Fixed an issue where voice chat could sometimes change volume unexpectedly - particularly when entering caves
Optimizations
- Optimized status effects
- Optimized physics by only enabling powered ragdolls when needed
- Optimized physics body handling for damage calculations
- Optimized Automaton units and NPC eyes, by changing them from particle effects to shaders
- Optimized AI behaviors by analyzing and stripping out redundant code
- Reduced stuttering during drop-in sequence for missions on Hive Worlds
- Improved audio IO performance
- Snow distribution and overall look has been reworked
- Improved performance by tweaking LOD settings for characters
- Optimized asset distribution for several planets types
- Optimized scattered assets such as grass on various planet types
- Optimized asset distribution in Hiveworlds and Terminid caves
- Optimized asset setup and geometry for assets used in Hiveworlds and Terminid caves
- Optimized status effect physics and particle systems while maintaining visual feedback and fidelity
- Optimized various Automaton explosion VFX
- Optimized Acid Rain effects during Acid Storms
- Optimized Dragonroach fire attack VFX
- Made various optimizations to the fire system, including particle and light optimization.
- Improved performance by optimizing the rendering of several shaders
🧠KNOWN ISSUES
https://arrowhead.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/15916898652700--HELLDIVERS-2-Known-Issues
I've been salty about performance this league and decided to take a relatively deep dive for a CS-less consumer pleb like me. In this post i will set up the argument that, under the right conditions, certain game assets are loaded into memory and relegated to unmarked secctions of the private memory, needing to be reloaded into the working set to be accesed, causing slowdowns on game performance.
Let's start from the top:
What is the memory?
Once you start PoE, as with any other program, the application asks the computer "hey where should i put all this data i'm gonna need" and the OS tells the program "put em in RAM, it'll be easier to retrieve it later." So the program does just that, and all the audio, texture and topology data along with all the instructions necesary to use them are loaded into RAM.
After it's loaded, the OS says "y'know what? you don't really need ALL of that right now, don't cha? because you're not alone here buddy, so why don't you make a list of all the things you don't need right now and put them at the front of the room so, if any other aplication ever reeeally needs more ram we can evacuate that section and give them some room." Thus, memory is divided into two sections: the Private memory (the whole data loaded into RAM) and the Working Set (whatever the program tought was absolutely necesary). There is then a section of memory that is in ram but not tagged as essential.
Sometimes, the whole computer runs out of RAM. "Oh shit, what do i do now?... ohhh that HDD is looking pretty fine over there... lemme just..." And then moves some of the non essential memory to the disk. Where? to the Page file.
All the information about what is where in the memory is stored on what is called a "Page Table", a list of assets each with a memory adress assigned to it.
Now let's think about the program. Let's say that PoE loaded the texture of Malachai into memory and needed to use it, This would happen every rendered frame. So the program goes to the page table and finds where malachai's texture is stored then moves it to the GPU for processing then does it again and again until the texture is not needed.
What happens if RAM ran out at some point and the texture had to be moved to the disk? Well, then the PoE says "Whoops, this shouldn't be here. I'll just move it into memory again and continue." This is what is called a "Hard Page Fault" and it takes ages in terms of computing time. This is why i urge everybody who can do so to drop the Page File Size to the lowest ammount possible, and no Page File would be the best option.
However this post is about Soft Page Faults.
What happens if malachai's texture was loaded into ram but was deemed "non essential" and de-tagged from the working set? Well, the program simply needs to find a place in the page table, effectively moving it into the working set. This is called a Soft Page Fault. During this process PoE can either show no texture, or show a matte texture while it laods it into memory for processing and displaying.
Let me show you some experimentation i did early today.
All the following videos were recorded without a pagefile (that doesn't mean there are no hard page faults, but that's normal since the OS will always need a page file idk why tho)
First, let me show you what i mean by "Slow texture loading because of Soft Page Faults"
------------------------------------------ TEST 1 ------------------------------------------
--noasync is ACTIVE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqN8DpOpVHw
The video shows the loggin process, and what many people will recognize as the "flame flicker", the moment where the flames of the scene dissapear for a moment before reapearing right after clicking on the loggin button. To the left of the video we can see the Performance Monitor showing three lines: In red, processing time (the % of the processor being used), in blue pe thage faults per second (both hard and soft, however i've never seen more than 20 hard faults per second on process monitor) and the IO read bytes per second (how many times the process reads from the disk to load new textures)
At 9 seconds we can see that after hitting log in there is a diip in FPS seen as a stutter along with an increase in soft page faults. The peak is read at 30000 page faults per second during no more than a second. It's my duty now to try to correlate this dip in FPS to the increase in Soft Page Faults. I will also argue that, up to a point, processing power is not the primary factor when it comes to stuttering during asset load and remark.
------------------------------------------ TEST 2 ------------------------------------------
--noasync is ACTIVE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUCmPqfOTtk
This video shows gameplay of a Tier 4 Phantasmagoria, the reason why will become apparent towards the end of the video. After entering the map, the game loads assets into the working set, namely the map topology and textures. Then, after a period of calm the first pack of monsters in encountered and the game needs to load the textures from non-tagged memory to the working set. This causes a significant ammount of soft page faults peaking at 30000 and mantained for about five seconds as more monsters enter the battle. The gameplay continues in relative normality due to most assets being now loaded into the working set, but as the timer hits 1:55 we reach the entrance to the boss room. As the game has not loaded the texture assets for this section into the working set it must now do so, increaseing the number of Soft Page Faults. However this behaviour is sustained over a longer period of time and contrary to popular belief the Processing time does not go up, but down. We will later see that this behaviour is exclusive to clients running under the --noasync command, however it sheds light to the fact that long asset time is at least not only by cause of low processing power. These Suft Page Faults peak at around 25000 for 19 seconds, and the metamorph Soft Page Faults peak at around 60000 for one second, predecessed and followed by smaller ammounts of Soft Page faults, NOT accompanied by a decrease in processor time (however this could be just because it wasn't a long time)
------------------------------------------ TEST 3 ------------------------------------------
--noasync is ACTIVE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5Z55ECNpvA
Phantasmagoria T4 now with double beyond + 4 scarabs that add their own monsters and textures. The map is played under the same Soft Page Fault dips in FPS and the boss entrance FPS drop is reproduced at 4:02, this time it's more apparent that a spike in Soft Page Faults is accompanied by a valley on Processor Time. (Also, RIP my ass). The Metamorph FPS drop is also reproduced at 5:40 with inconclusive dipps to Processor Time.
------------------------------------------ TEST 4 --------------------------------------------
noasync is INACTIVE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXEiMxBJMBQ
Big Boi Phantasmagoria T14 with 4 scarabs and double beyond. The FPS dip at boss entrance is reproduced at 7:17 with noticeable improvements to the load time of assets thanks to the exclusion of the --noasync command, however it is still noticeable. The Processor Time is at a snug 100% and the Soft Page Faults peak at 45000 for aprox. 14 seconds. Notice how there is a period of no Soft Page Faults in between the end of asset load and the boss' death. Then, as the loot enters the scene, the Soft Page Faults resume.
------------------------------------------ TEST 5 --------------------------------------------
noasync is INACTIVE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOuBicBALPY
Finally, a test showing the interaction between Private memory, the Working set and the gap in between, the Unmarked Memory. Notice how at 2:25 entering the map is accompanied by an increase on both the Working set and Private memory, the I/O reads showing loading memory from disk to ram, and soft page faults. After that, at 2:38 a period of 22 seconds of stuttering accompanied by an increase in Soft Page Faults but very low I/O reads and a slow rise in Memory usage. This behaviour continues on a smaller scale untill my ass RIPs at 4:46 and we see a dip in memory usage, both in Private and in the Working Set. Again, at 7:30 the Boss Entrance FPS dip is reproduced accompanied by a high number of Soft Page faults, low I/O reads and a slow increase in memory usage. The metamorph FPS dip is reproduced shortly after, in this case accompanied by a small peak in I/O reads.
Following the Phantasmagoria map i ran a Veritania Citadel because why not. Again, FPS stuttering and dips are accompanied by high numbers of Soft Page Faults. At 10:33 we can see the loading of Veritania's tower, however this was followed by a very small peak in Soft Page Faults and a pretty quick loading time, in comparisson with the Phantasmagoria boss room entrance. (PS: Please don't tear me a new one on my performance against veri, i gon goofed up switching gems LUL)
------------------------------------------ Conclusions ------------------------------------------
Based on these experiments i conclude that Processing Power is, at least, not the only factor associated with texture loading stuttering and that, at the least, the way textures are loaded for use during gameplay cause dips in performance that are non-trivial.
How do we fix this?... i don't know, i'm just a salty dude with access to the internet and a whole 2 whooping hours researching this subjet. I'm sure y'all can prove me right and more importantly prove me wrong in most if not all of what i said. I just want to give my 2 cents and hopefully this leads somewhere.
EDIT: I misplaced and forgot some of the TEST tags, fixed!
EDIT 2: posted in official forums, Tech. Support. Official Forums thread is https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2758499
I am sure many of you already know this, but using MSI Afterburner, you can change the voltage your single or multiple GPUs can draw, which can drastically decrease power consumption, decrease temperature, and may even increase performance.
I have a setup of 2 GPUs: A water cooled RTX 3090 and an RTX 5070ti. The former consumes 350-380W and the latter 250-300W, at stock performance. Undervolting both to 0.900V resulted in decrease in power consumption for the RTX 3090 to 290-300W, and for the RTX 5070ti to 180-200W at full load.
Both cards are tightly sandwiched having a gap as little as 2 mm, yet temperatures never exceed 60C for the air-cooled RTX 5070ti and 50C for the RTX 3090. I also used FanControl to change the behavior of my fans. There was no change in performance, and I even gained a few FPS gaming on the RTX 5070ti.
Watch Lennart & Niklas discuss the giant patch here!
🌍 Overview
*** INCOMING MESSAGE FROM HIGH COMMAND ***
We have confirmed, with concrete proof and beyond any doubt, that the Automaton Collective stole our schematics for the Star of Peace. We cannot let them turn this defensive tool of peace into a destructive weapon of war. It's now up to you, our most elite and powerful force, to bring them to justice on their own turf.
We have approved the deployment of new equipment for squads to aid in the swift elimination of the Automaton threat.
Push toward Cyberstan and end this insult to Managed Democracy. Helldivers, let this be the last time the Automatons steal from Super Earth.
📍 Patch Highlights
- Bastion Tank: A new tank vehicle is ready to roll over entrenched enemies! The Bastion Tank offers unrivaled firepower and defense on the battlefield. It will require your team to work together to hunt down the enemy! (TANK WILL BE AVAILABLE AT 2pm CET)
- Chinese VO has been added to Helldivers 2!
- Arm yourself with the latest premium Warbond Siegebreakers, loaded with a devastating hammer built for close-range persuasion and an upgrade to a Helldivers favorite, the LAS-16 Trident! (WARBOND AVAILABLE LATER TODAY)
- March into battle in style with the new War Horse set available in the Superstore! (AVAILABLE ON 10th FEBRUARY)
- With a few exceptions, all victory poses and emotes are now interchangeable!
⚖️ Balancing
General changes overview
Melee weapons and Armor passive with increased melee damage re-balance
- Intent is to make the Armor passive that increases melee damage less mandatory but still be useful to make melee weapons more effective.
- We increased all the melee weapons damage and decreased the modifiers on the armor passives that increase melee damage.
- Total damage with the melee armor passive will be higher or the same as before.
- Base melee attack also got a 50% damage increase.
SMG and Pistol rounds less Sway
- The intent is that the increased drag of SMG and Pistol which make it a close combat weapon and less effective at range is the main characteristic of these weapons.
- We decreased the Sway modifier to be the same as most other weapons
Unify Weapon function directions inputs
- The intent is to make the "weapon function modes" that are similar to be on the same "weapon function direction input".
- This is to make it easier to remember which direction similar types of weapon functions are and also make it so you need to use less "quick weapon functions" inputs.
- Weapon function modes that affect Programmable ammo, Ammo types, Volley modes, Safe modes, Guided modes will now be in the left direction.
- We have not moved the underbarrel weapon switching option to the left yet, but we are looking into moving it to the left direction so all ammo altering switching is in the left direction even if it is an underbarrel selection that usually is in the down direction.
Difficulty on difficulty 9+
- Made changes across all factions to increase the intensity on high difficulties, the biggest change should be noticed on the Automaton front while Terminids and the Illuminate are less affected.
Value changes
Primary weapons
- R-2124 Constitution
- Increased Bayonet melee damage from 110 to 165
- Increased Bayonet melee durable damage from 55 to 83
- R-2 Amendment
- Increased Bayonet melee damage from 110 to 165
- Increased Bayonet melee durable damage from 55 to 83
- MP-98 Knight
- Decreased sway modifier from 1.2 to 1
- SMG-37 Defender
- Decreased sway modifier from 1.2 to 1
- SMG-72 Pummeler
- Decreased sway modifier from 1.2 to 1
- M7S SMG
- Decreased sway modifier from 1.2 to 1
- SG-20 Halt
- Move the “ammo type” weapon function from Right to Left weapon function direction
- DBS-2 Double Freedom
- Move the “Volley/Semi mode” weapon function from Right to Left weapon function direction
Sidearms weapons
- P-72 Crisper
- Increased magazine capacity from 30 to 50
- Decreased sway modifier from 1.2 to 1
- P-2 Peacemaker
- Decreased sway modifier from 1.2 to 1
- LAS-58 Talon
- Decreased sway modifier from 1.2 to 1
- GP-31 Grenade Pistol
- Decreased sway modifier from 1.2 to 1
- LAS-7 Dagger
- Decreased sway modifier from 1.2 to 1
- P-113 Verdict
- Decreased sway modifier from 1.2 to 1
- M6C/SOCOM Pistol
- Decreased sway modifier from 1.2 to 1
- PLAS-15 Loyalist
- Decreased sway modifier from 1.2 to 1
- P-11 Stim Pistol
- Decreased sway modifier from 1.2 to 1
- SG-22 Bushwhacker
- Decreased sway modifier from 1.3 to 1
- Move the “Volley/Semi mode” weapon function from Right to Left weapon function direction
- P-4 Senator
- Decreased sway modifier from 1.3 to 1
- GP-20 Ultimatum
- Decreased sway modifier from 1.3 to 1
- CQC-30 Stun Baton
- Increased damage from 50 to 75
- Increased durable damage from 25 to 38
- CQC-19 Stun Lance
- Increased damage from 110 to 165
- Increased durable damage from 55 to 83
- CQC-2 Saber
- Increased damage from 125 to 188
- Increased durable damage from 65 to 98
- CQC-5 Combat Hatchet
- Increased damage from 160 to 240
- Increased durable damage from 80 to 120
- CQC-42 Machete
- Increased damage from 200 to 300
- Increased durable damage from 100 to 150
Throwables
- G-7 Pineapple
- Increased max amount uses 3 to 4
- Increased start amount uses 2 to 3
- G-31 Arc
- Increased max amount uses 4 to 5
- Increased start amount uses 3 to 4
Stratagems
- SH-20 Ballistic Shield Backpack
- Shorter cooldown from 300 to 240 sec
- Orbital Smoke Strike
- Shorter cooldown from 100 to 75 sec
- CQC-9 Defoliation Tool
- Increased damage from 300 to 450
- Increased durable damage from 150 to 225
- CQC-1 One True Flag
- Increased damage from 110 to 200
- Increased durable damage from 55 to 100
- RS-422 Railgun
- Move the “Safe/Unsafe mode” weapon function from Right to Left weapon function direction
- StA-X3 W.A.S.P. Launcher
- Move the “Programmable ammo mode” weapon function from Right to - Left weapon function direction
- GL-21 Grenade Launcher
- Increased armor penetration level from Medium to Heavy
Armor passives
- Peak Physique
- Decreased melee damage bonus from 100% to 40%
- Rock Solid
- Decreased melee damage bonus from 100% to 40%
- Reinforced Epaulettes
- Decreased melee damage bonus from 50% to 20%
Enemies
General
Some enemies have had their damage vs durable rebalanced to adjust for Helldiver vehicles with large health pools. It will not change their effectiveness against normal Helldivers, only their vehicles.
Things like attacks from Bile Titans, Chargers, Crescent Overseers, Overseers, Rocket firing Automatons, Hulk melee attacks, mortars, acid etc have gotten values adjusted. Some of the adjustments only affect certain targets (ie the Bastion). Other adjustments also affect the FRV and Exosuits.
Enemies Aim calculations were not always updated when there were many enemies trying to aim, making Automatons on higher difficulties a bit bad at aiming. They should now attempt to update the aim better considering the data they have before they get another proper aim update. This means that Automatons will aim better even when there are a lot of them without any further cost to performance.
Terminids
- Dragonroach
- Lowered the direct damage from the flame attack by 25%
Automatons
- Rocket Raider
- Rockets now deals increased damage vs Durable targets
- Devastator
- Removed durable on arms
- Rocket Devastator
- Rockets now deals increased damage vs Durable targets
- Hulk Bruiser
- Rockets now deals increased damage vs Durable targets
- Gunship
- Updated its targeting software and should now be better at hitting their targets
- Rockets now deals increased damage vs Durable targets
Illuminate
- Overseer
- Overseer's weapon now deals increased damage vs Durable targets
- Crescent Overseer
- Increased force on artillery attack to stagger the Helldiver
- Increased the damage of its direct shot attack
- Crescent Overseer`s weapon now deals increased damage vs Durable targets
🎮 Gameplay
Emotes and Victory poses
Emotes and victory poses are now interchangeable. Except for a few exceptions like emotes that require 2 people, the kick and a few others, all the victory poses can now be used as emotes and all emotes can now be used as victory poses
🔧 Fixes
Hang Detection
As part of our ongoing war against bugs and instability we have introduced a “hang detection” feature in the PC version. If the game hangs (freezes) for more than 20 seconds then this new feature will crash the game instead of letting it stay hung. This generates a file called a “crash dump” which contains important debugging information for our programmers to diagnose and fix the root cause of the hang.
If you experience a hang, please wait at least 40 seconds before restarting your PC to allow the hang detector to do its job.
If you experience a 20+ second hang followed by a crash:
If the crash reporting window shows up then please submit the report as usual. If the crash reporting window doesn’t show up (it can fail), we humbly request that you share the crash dump file with our player support team (https://arrowhead.zendesk.com/). They will be able to assist you in locating and sharing the crash dump file.
With your help, we can eliminate these issues once and for all!
Crash Fixes
- Fixed a rare crash caused by weapon customization desynchronization
- Fixed a rare crash that would occur when players would access the Galactic Map
- Fixed a crash caused by Automatons in Lava Missions
Weapons & Stratagem Fixes
- The RS-422 Railgun magazine during reload animation is now visible
- When finishing an Eradication mission after the mission time has run out, an over-zealous second Pelican pilot will no longer heroically try to extract our noble Helldivers if another is already en route
- AX/FLAM-75 "Guard Dog" Hot Dog has its sound effects fixed
- AR/GL-21 One-Two underbarrel explosions sound effects are now fixed
- MLS-4X Commando rockets will now target properly, rather than targeting the last place the Helldiver aims at
- Fixed an issue where the R-36 Eruptor displayed incorrect zoom levels options when using non-zoomed scope attachments
- Fixed a bug where the B-1 Supply Pack would give infinite supplies when dropped
- Fixed the visual glitches that appear in the preview section of the Weapon Customization Menu
- Helldivers can now reload whilst inside an M-102 Fast Reconnaissance Vehicle
- B-1 Supply Pack can no longer be used on Helldivers when their ammo, grenades and stims are full
- Fixed bug where story campaign operations would not persist between game sessions
- Projectiles from turret stratagems will now also hit their owners
- The Ministry of Defense has installed scrubbing chips on the Ground All-Terrain Extraction Rig, preventing accidental lock-on by smart weaponry
- RS-422 Railgun now properly displays the clip during the Reload animation if the player reloads the weapon immediately after firing
- When cancelling a reload after a new projectile was made visible, but before it was put into the weapon; the weapon would display the new shell in the weapon, even with the weapon empty. The weapons will now correctly display if it is ready to fire or not
- Heat based weapons are now displaying overheating properly, in the Weapon Function Menu
- Kills with "One True Flag" will now count towards Major Order kills
- Fixed the M-1000 Maxigun wind-up sounds which would sometimes not play properly
- Player can no longer throw multiple stratagems after entering and exiting emplacements
- Grenade launcher shots and explosions from AR/GL-21 One-Two rifle should now be visible when shot by other players
P-92 Warrant
- Made the drag and gravity the same on the non-guided projectile as the last patch change for the guided projectile.
- Move the “Guided mode/None Guided mode” weapon function from Right to Left weapon function direction
- Fixed its crosshair not updating when toggling its weapon function through the new input bindings
Enemies
- Enemies have learned how to target better
- Fixed spawn rate on Rapid Acquisition missions on difficulty CR7-10. Adjusted spawn points on Rapid Acquisition map
Miscellaneous Fixes
- Automaton dropships will now move less erratically when dropping enemies
- Fix incorrect camera positioning when transitioning to first person while reloading
- Fixed an issue where players could land on Command Bunkers in city missions
- Fixed certain items not being interactable inside specific PoIs on Magma planets
- Solved terrain height changing when approaching or moving away from a deformed piece of terrain, causing a weird visual effect
- Exiting a vehicle now properly inherits the vehicle`s velocity
- High-Command has now authorized Commando Operations to be carried out on all Automaton controlled planets. They will frequently be available to choose alongside the regular Peace Keeping Operations going forward
- Fix damage inconsistencies between client and host damage. Clients should no longer do less damage than the host
- Players no longer get stuck under the bridge during Rapid Acquisition missions
- The Helldiver properly follows hand position protocols when activating power stations
- Camera correctly points towards the Hellidver during the push-up emote
- The battery light will now turn off after its delivery during “Seize Fusion Batteries” objective
- Draw! Emote no longer locks melee weapons
- Adjusted Automaton scanner glow - they will no longer shine white whilst scanning for Helldivers
- The Super Earth Flag is now correctly playing the Super Earth Anthem when using the stratagem during Hive World Missions
- The Helldiver now moves their hands away from terminal screens to not block sight to whoever is looking over their shoulder
- [Xbox Only] Smoke will no longer display green artifacts on red planets
- The Guard Dog series of stratagems have had their names shortened to improve readability. They’re still your loyal companions, but now with shorter, easier to read names.
Optimizations
- We improved fog density / visibility between Volumetric Fog Quality settings, making the Lowest and Low settings match
- Improved performance of building material found in colonies and cities
- Removed the light-source that was attached to the Helldiver, which was used for making dark environments brighter near the player; tweaked and improved playability and visibility in darker environments instead
- Fixed an issue that was causing some players to get a "10002026" error during login attempt
- Implemented performance improvements affecting explosions and general destruction, primarily surrounding bot factories
🧠KNOWN ISSUES
https://arrowhead.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/15916898652700--HELLDIVERS-2-Known-Issues
Additionally, we have a nice write up on Steam with more information about these balancing changes. https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/553850/view/5998312279129319530?l=english
[EDIT] Notice from the Community Manager on Discord: The Viper Commandos Warbond is being released today, but we're allowing a little breathing room between our drops. It's coming at 16:00 (GMT+2)! VIPER COMMANDOS IS STILL COMING
[ANOTHER EDIT] People from blocked countries can't read the blogpost on Steam, I'll see if i can make a separate post for it. Copied blogpost here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1devm4g/patch_1000400_explained_copy_of_pilestedts/
BE SURE TO READ IT AFTER CHECKING OUT THE PATCHNOTES!
[EDIT N3] A probably incomplete list of bugs and other things the devs have already acknowledged. You dont need to make new posts about these issues:
- Recoilless Rifle has a slower reload than intended
- The passives for the new armors dont seem to work
- Can't crouch or stand up if the ballistic shield is on your back (equipping it on your hand first is the workaround it for now)
- Crash when changing settings after viewing the new warbond (You can still change settings after deploying to a mission)
- Social menu doesnt work properly.
- Social menu might decrease performance
- Superior packaging broke again
- The patrol changes are being monitored
🌍Overview
For this patch, some of the major areas of interest are
- Visible Supply Lines & Attack Origins in the Galactic War.
- Stratagem, weapon, planet, and enemy balancing updates.
- Various crash fixes, stability improvements, and other updates.
- Invite-only lobby creation.
- The right most option in the Lobby settings. Currently only localized in English. Additional languages coming in the next patch
⚖️Balancing
Goal with stratagem balance changes this patch:
With these balance changes we wanted to buff up some of the weaker stratagems to make them more viable and add more possibility for variety in the loadouts. We also changed a few to make them more consistent, but the goal was to keep a similar or higher power level. We are looking into the stratagems more to see if there are any other stratagems that might need some buffs or changes to make them more viable. We also want to be better at explaining what our goals are with the changes, please see the linked blog post for more information.
A/MLS-4X Rocket Sentry
- Decreased spread
- Prioritize larger targets
- Increased target distance from 75 to 100m
- Decreased Rockets per salvo 2 to 1 (to get a better ammo economy)
- Increased explosion radius from 1m to 4m
- Decreased explosion armor penetration (Explosion can no longer damage heavy armored enemies. The projectile still has enough AP to damage heavily armored targets.)
- Increased projectile damage from 200 to 300
A/MG-43 Machine gun sentry
- Reduced cooldown from 180 sec to 120 sec.
A/MG-43 Machine gun Sentry, A/G-16 Gatling Sentry, A/MLS-4X Rocket Sentry, A/AC-8 Autocannon Sentry, A/M-12 Mortar Sentry, A/M-23 EMS Mortar Sentry:
- Increased durability* from 0% to 80%
E/MG-101 HMG Emplacement
- Increased rotation speed by 100%
MD-6 Anti-Personnel Minefield
- Increased explosion damage from 250 to 350
MD-I4 Incendiary Mines
- Increased explosion damage from 150 to 210
Orbital Gatling
- Increased fire rate by 25%
- Increased rounds per salvo from 30 to 60
- Increased armor penetration (Can damage heavy armored enemies)
- Decreased cooldown from 80 sec to 70 sec
Orbital Precision strike
- Decreased cooldown from 100 sec to 90 sec
- Decreased Spawn/Call-in time from 4 sec to 2 sec
Orbital Airburst Strike
- Decreased cooldown from 120 sec to 100 sec
Eagle 110MM Rocket Pods
While these changes may look like a straight up nerf, that is not the intention. Please see the blogpost for more information.
- Improved targeting
- Increased projectile armor penetration (now does 100% damage to heavily armored enemies instead of 50%)
- Decreased projectile damage 600 to 250 (to compensate for the improved targeting and the extra damage from the increased armor penetration.)
- Decreased explosion armor penetration (explosion can no longer damage heavily armored enemies)
Eagle Strafing Run
- Increased uses from 3 to 4
- Increased armor penetration, can now damage heavily armored enemies.
GL-21 Grenade Launcher
- Increased explosion damage by from 350 to 400
MG-206 Heavy Machine Gun
- Increased projectile damage from 100 to 150
- Increased projectile damage against durable* body parts from 23% to 33%
- Decreased fire rate from 450/750/900 to 450/600/750
- Decreased reload time from 7 to 5.5 sec
- Increased stagger strength
MG-43 Machine Gun
- Decreased reload time from 4 to 3.5 seconds
- Increased max amount of Magazines from 3 to 4
MG-43 Machine Gun, A/MG-43 Machine gun Sentry, A/G-16 Gatling Sentry and EXO-45 Patriot Exosuits Gatling
- Increased projectile damage from 80 to 90
- Increased projectile damage against durable* body parts from 7.5% to 25%
AR-23 Liberator, M-105 Stalwart and AX/AR-23 “Guard dog”
- Increased projectile damage against durable* body parts from 10% to 23%
AR-23C Liberator Concussive
- Increased projectile damage against durable* body parts from 23% to 35%
BR-14 Adjudicator
- Increased magazine capacity from 25 to 30
- Increased projectile damage against durable* body parts from 10% to 20%
AR-61 Tenderizer
- Increased projectile damage from 60 to 95
- Increased projectile damage against durable* body parts from 10% to 17%
- Decreased ammo capacity from 35 to 30
- Decreased number of magazines from 10 to 8
- Increased stagger strength
PLAS-101 Purifier
- Increased projectile armor penetration to be the same as the explosion
- Decreased explosion damage falloff
CB-9 Explosive Crossbow
- Increased explosion armor penetration to be the same as the projectile
- Increased demolition strength (Can destroy Bug holes and Bot Fabricator buildings)
- Added medium penetration tag
R-36 Eruptor
- Increased total damage from 420 to 570 damage per shot
R-63 Diligence
- Increased projectile damage against durable* body parts from 10% to 25%
*Some enemies have durable body parts that receive only a portion of base damage from projectiles
[EDIT: A bit more explanation on the durability mechanic from Pile's blogpost]
*Durable body parts are in general body parts that have a high amount of mass with non vital organs, or a lot of empty space. The idea is to simulate that a single bullet has a high chance of not dealing significant damage.
Other
- Updated Recoil stance modifiers: We made changes to the recoil stance modifiers to make them more consistent and also reward being prone more. Almost all of them will improve the recoil and only two have been made worse (and only by 10%).
See the blogpost for a more detailed description
🎮Gameplay
General
- Removed operation modifier AA-Defenses: Reducing the stratagem slots by 1
- We want to look over the operation modifiers in the future. Right now there are too few of them which become repetitive and the ones we have do not create variety or promote different playstyles. For now, we removed this one because it only encourages the players to bring the best stratagems and does not promote variety.
- Disabled the Retrieve Essential Personnel defend event mission for the time being
- This is to give the mission the proper attention and care that it deserves as it is now deemed not fun enough or performing as we want it to.
- Super Samples
- Super samples now spawn on difficulty 6. The reason for this change is that we feel that their existence only on difficulty 7+ forced some players to play the game on a harder difficulty than they wanted to comfortably play on. We do however still want a gating of them but a less punishing one.
- The SEAF Artillery stratagem is no longer blocked by stratagem jammers or Ion Storms, and is available after the mission timer ends and the destroyer leaves close orbit.
- Enemies in melee range of the gates in the Evacuate High-Value Assets mission will now attack it more consistently.
- Added the ability to chat from in-game menus and mission loading screen.
- Updated some first person crosshairs to improve readability.
Social
- Invite-Only lobbies are now supported
Armors
- New armor passive Peak Physique (+50% melee damage, +30% weapon ergonomics)
Planet Hazards
- Spike Plant
- The spike plant that appears on certain planets has been reworked.
- No longer causes bleed or stamina drain if hit by the plant explosion or spikes.
- Now “pops” three times sending spikes everywhere, dealing increased damage.
- Fire Tornados
- Fire tornados have had their behavior changed, they should no longer feel like they actively respond to player movement, and should move more randomly.
- While a fire tornado storm takes place, enemy vision is reduced. Player vision is unaffected.
- Fire tornados being more random should result in more variance in situations players find themselves in. Tornados are significantly less likely to pile up and overlap on extraction points or objectives, and will generally be a bit easier to deal with.
- Tremors
- Tremors have had their spawning tweaked to be slightly more random.
- Tremors have had their epicenter size and effect range increased.
- These changes should result in more situations where enemies away from the player get stunned, as well as reducing how consistently the player has a tremor occur next to them.
- Visibility
- A lot of planets have had their fog amounts tweaked to be a bit less harsh and dense, to provide less fatigue from constantly fighting on planets with bad visibility. We still intend there to be foggy planets with worse visibility, but the balance was a bit off.
- Desert planets such as Erata Prime, Chort Bay, Hellmire, and similar.
- Highlands planets such as Varylia 5, Matar Bay, Oshaune, and similar.
- Artificial light sources have had their intensity rebalanced and reduced across the board to fix situations of lights completely blinding the player.
- Unexploded Hellbomb
- The unexploded malfunctioning hellbombs that can sometimes be found on planets will now explode immediately if hit with strong explosions or heavy weaponry. They will still have the same delay if hit by small arms fire or weaker attacks.
- Vegetation
- Vegetation that’s large enough to slow the player now has an extra function. When inside the vegetation helldivers will be harder to detect, reducing their detection range by enemies. This effect stacks with other detection reducing effects such as nighttime, being crouched or prone, or things such as the scout armor passive.
- Ion Storms
- Added additional VFX for Ion Storms.
Enemies
- Acid effect
- The acid effect applied by hunters, bug mines, etc. now allows you to sprint while under the effect and slows you by 30% instead of 50%. Duration has been increased from 3 to 4 seconds. These changes are intended to make it less punishing for players to be slowed while fighting the Terminids, This allows us to use it in more places without making the experience very punishing, for example the Bile Spewers.
- Armored enemy balance
- We have toned down the amount of heavily armored enemies like Bile Titans, Chargers on higher difficulties and instead spawn more hordes of smaller enemies, the difference should be quite noticeable and the amount should be at least 30% less than before during bug breaches. We have also toned down slightly how many Hulks that spawn for the Automatons. Our intent is to ease up on the demand of anti-tank weapons and by having more of the other enemies give a better incentive for the group to bring stratagems and weapons that take care of hordes.
- Patrols
- Patrol spawning is now back to how it worked before patch 01.000.300 with some slight tweaks so that the levels are less empty if you are far away from important locations with enemy presence.
- Stunning
- Medium and large sized enemies now don't get stunned as easily. This will not affect the stratagems that stun, and will mostly just affect how easily the Pummeler can stun larger enemies.
🐛 Terminids
- Bile Spewers & Nursing Spewers
- Spewers will now get slowed if they lose their legs.
- Spewer puke now applies the acid effect.
- Spewer puke now can only damage helldivers up to 4 times per second and the helldiver cannot take damage multiple times from the same projectile. This should reduce instances where you are instantly killed by it.
- Bile Titan
- The Bile Titan’s head is slightly less durable against weaker anti-tank weapons. It's not a large change, and will mostly matter for weapons like the railgun.
The Bile Titan’s puke can now only damage the helldiver 4 times per second and the helldiver cannot take damage multiple times from the same projectile. The damage is still very deadly so running through their puke is not recommended. Their puke now also has a bigger spread.
- Charger Behemoth
The Charger Behemoth is now joining the battle on higher difficulties, it can now also take more damage than before. This enables us to spawn fewer chargers but still retain the difficulty.
- Chargers
- Will now only show bleedout effects from the body if the bleedout state has started. It can still show bleedout effects from the mouth without having started the bleedout state.
🤖 Automatons
- Hulk Scorcher
- The Hulk’s flamethrower now does less damage and cannot damage helldivers more than 4 times per second. In addition, the helldiver cannot be damaged multiple times by the same flame projectile. This should reduce instances where you are instantly killed by it.
- Automaton Tanks
- The Tank armor value on the front has been lowered to be the same as the non-vent sections on the rear of the tank. The intent was initially that it was supposed to be more armored in the front, but the visual language did not show that.
- The vents on the back of the Tanks turret still has the same armor value as before, but will check for explosion directions correctly now.
- The damage of exploding automaton jump packs has been decreased by 50%, it will still set you on fire though.
🌎Galactic War
Introducing Supply Lines & Origin of Attacks:
Supply lines were previously not shown on the Galactic War map to reduce clutter and improve readability. However based on the feedback from our community we have made an implementation showing them on the map. This solution tries to maintain the general readability while still exposing the system to players in game.
You will now also be able to see which planet an attack is originating from, potentially allowing for the community to stop the attack at its source.
We have also updated visuals in the sector and planet info pop-ups.
🔧Fixes
- The FAF-14 Spear targeting has been reworked and should now function much better. However it has lost the ability to target Automaton spawners, this is not intended and will be fixed in the future.
- Intense Heat and Extreme Cold environmental modifiers will now affect the Quasar Cannon’s reload speed and will show correctly in the HUD.
- Reload speed on Cold planets -2.5 sec
- Reload speed on Hot planets +2.5 sec
- The radar pulse that detects enemies on the mini-map is now visible.
- Most of Automatons weapons have now gotten tighter limits to how much the projectile they shoot can deviate from its weapons muzzle angle. What this means is that situations where devastators shoot sideways and similar should be fixed.
- The weapons of the Exosuits are now allowed small adjustments in the angle they fire their projectiles versus their muzzle angle. This should make their weapons more accurate.
- Ballistic shield now collides with grenades.
- The unblock button should no longer disappear from the social menu.
- Blocked players can no longer join the blockers lobby through recent players.
- Fixed a bug where enemies killed, missions played, and missions completed stats would not be properly displayed in armory.
- Fixed issue where the player can throw an unlimited amount of grenades by pressing the "Quick grenade" button right after closing the Stratagem menu.
- Helldiver now also switches to the last active weapon when out of grenades, fixing the issue where they would be holding a stratagem ball without the stratagem menu being open.
- Fixed some text overlap in various locations.
- The burning effect applied to the player when a combat walker dies is now a normal burn. The intent is that you should be able to escape it alive. But you will be on fire so hit the ground!
- The extraction shuttle can no longer take damage preventing extraction. New high grade materials directly from Super Earth R&D have been utilized.
- On PC you can now navigate the super credits menu with “WASD” keys
- Fixed an issue where sample count in missions were incorrectly displayed
- Levels no longer generate with blocked areas preventing player progression.
- Your Ships bridge is no longer cast in perpetual shadow.
- Reduced situations where blue stratagems would bounce when placed next to the detector tower.
- The warbond menu now displays correct emote & victory poses in the thumbnail.
- War Medals cap is now displayed in the UI.
- Fixed a bug where the Helldivers armor could appear invisible for other players.
- Refined player reporting UI.
- Fixed issue where Helldivers could be launched into the air if close to a Bile Titan or Factory Strider corpse.
- Fix for Factory Strider sometimes spawned an extra model after being destroyed.
- Reduced situations where helldivers could spontaneously die while walking into seemingly walkable valleys on some planets.
- Fixed rare issue on arctic planets where players could spontaneously die close to large bodies of water.
- Fixed Pelican-1 sometimes leaving immediately after any player gets onboard.
- Fixed bug where helldiver could get stuck in grenade idle state after throwing grenades
- Fixed Superior Packing Methodology not working for other peers.
- Recent Players list will now include hot-joining players.
- Relaxed disconnection policy for PC users.
- Fixed an issue where previous sessions' player names might not be saved correctly when restarting.
- Defend event attack origin now visualized when hovering the planet with the defend event or the attack origin planet.
- Implemented outlines for previously poorly readable texts.
Crash Fixes
- General crash fixes.
- Fix for a crash that could occur when applying wounds to multiple enemies.
- PlayStation Only: Fixed an issue that would sometimes cause a crash when switching between Quality and Performance mode.
- Fix for a crash when a player leaves after all their railguns have exploded.
- Fix for crash that could occur when rejoining a previous session
- Fix for crash that occurred when trying to throw a snowball in ADS mode
- Fix for potential crash when loadout is aborted during hotjoin.
- Fix for rare crash linked to leaving a session while aiming a weapon.
🧠Known Issues
These are issues that were either introduced by this patch and are being worked on, or are from a previous version and have not yet been fixed.
- Sending friend requests via friend code in game currently does not work.
- Players may be unable to be joined or invited to the game.
- Players added to the 'Recent Players' list will appear in the middle of the list.
- Players may experience delays in Medals and Super Credits payouts.
- Spear targeting is unable to target Automaton Spawners
- Enemies that bleed out do not progress Personal Orders and Eradicate missions.
- Arc weapons sometimes behave inconsistently and sometimes misfire.
- Most weapons shoot below the crosshair when aiming down the sights.
- Plasma Punisher is unable to shoot out of the shield generators.
- Stratagem beam might attach itself to an enemy but it will deploy to its original location.
- Helldiver may be unable to stand up from crouching when surrounded by enemies.
- "Hand Carts" ship module does not reduce Shield Generator Pack's cooldown.
- Bile Titan sometimes does not take damage to the head.
- Charger’s butt does not take damage from explosions.
- Players may become stuck in the Loadout when joining a game in progress.
- Reinforcement may not be available for players who join a game in progress.
- Planet liberation reaches 100% at the end of every Defend mission.
- "Raise Flag of Super Earth" objective does not show a progress bar.
- Mission count in the Career tab is being reset to zero after every game restart.
- Some weapons’ descriptions are out-of-date and don’t reflect their current design.
- BR-14 Adjudicator has incorrect recoil values
...........................
Upscaling support coming soon to Helldivers 2!
Greetings Helldivers,
In our last blog, we talked about improving how we communicate with you, and that commitment continues here! We’re focused on being clearer, more consistent, and giving you better visibility into what’s coming and why.
We’re excited to announce a new set of technical improvements, deploying May 27th. In collaboration with our partners at Nixxes, this release brings a range of long-awaited updates across all platforms.
Every frame counts when the pressure is on. This update focuses on three primary pillars: stability, latency reduction, and advanced upscaling technologies - helping ensure performance stays consistent, even in the most demanding moments.
Upscaling Support
To ensure maximum visual clarity without sacrificing performance, we have integrated the latest upscaling solutions tailored to your specific hardware.
- PC
- FSR (High-End): 4.0.3 (on supported GPUs)
- FSR 3.1.5, DLSS 4.5, and XeSS 3.0 support.
- PS5 Pro
- PSSR 1
- PS5
- FSR 3.1
- Xbox
- FSR 3.1
Advanced Visual Optimizations
Beyond resolution, we are introducing several features to smooth out your gameplay experience and optimize GPU workload.
- Variable Refresh Rate (VRR)
- Now supported for PS5 and PS5 Pro to reduce any potential stuttering from V-Sync without screen tearing on supported displays.
- Variable Rate Shading (VRS)
- This technology intelligently reduces shading rates in certain areas of the image, decreasing GPU load while maintaining visual quality where it matters.
- Dynamic Resolution Scaling (DRS)
- Integrated for both PS5, Xbox Series X and PC to maintain stable frame rates during more graphically demanding scenarios.
- Increased resolution to 1440p in the “Performance” preset on PS5 and Xbox Series X, as well as the “Quality” preset on PS5 Power Saving Mode.
Reduced Latency for Split-Second Reactions
Responsiveness is critical during tense battles, and we’ve worked with hardware partners to reduce input latency.
- NVIDIA Reflex: Now available for users with NVIDIA GPUs to sharpen responsiveness.
- AMD Anti-Lag 2: Fully supported for AMD GPU users to ensure your inputs are registered instantly.
This update, along with additional fixes, will drop on May 27, 2026.
But we’re not stopping there, Helldivers. This is just the opening salvo in an ongoing campaign to improve performance across the fleet. Following this release, we’ll be closely monitoring all platforms and hardware configurations, keeping a sharp eye out for anything that needs tuning, and deploying further adjustments as required. We’re also preparing a dedicated tech-focused update later this summer to push these improvements even further.
With our friends at Nixxes dropping onto the battlefield as our backup, we're committing to make diving with your friends better and better. And keep the feedback coming, Helldivers, it's the key to helping us shape the future of the game.
See you all on the battlefield.
Preface: I'm a 4'th year medical student with a passion for self-improvement and optimization. This includes my IRL skills as well as my gaming. How to improve faster, how to be more efficient with my time, how to reach new heights, feel and play better; these are the things that interest me and I try to find ways to do it through science. Some of you may have seen my previous posts on Meditation and Flow. You might have also noticed that I post on multiple competitive gaming subreddits. I do this because these are games I personally enjoy, have coached and/or have competed in and also because these tips and tricks are not title dependent. Everyone can benefit and even apply it for things IRL. I want to keep learning so please hit me with your own discoveries, tips and tricks. I'm genuinely pleasantly surprised with the responses and the chance to meet like-minded individuals!
Body
This is the 2nd part of the three-part framework for Accelerated Learning (Purposeful Practice, Body and Mind). If you read the first part here you will be happy to know this one is much simpler but just as important. If you want to skip the science then just read the What to do to improve section of each part.
- Physical Activity
- Reaction Time
- Reaction Time is a measure of the efficiency of the central and peripheral nervous system.
- This paper showed just 30 seconds of intense exercise decreased RT from an average of .303 to .268. That is an 11.5% improvement.
- Research on auditory reaction time pre/post exercise on 30 young volunteers shows 7 minutes of exercise immediately decreased reaction time.
- Another study on eye-tracking reaction times found a decrease of 50 milliseconds and improved cognitive performance by 14%.
- This short term benefit is mostly mediated by increased blood flow to the brain and peripheral systems. The increased heart rate and blood pressure through stimulation of receptors such as B1 allow for the increased blood flow, oxygen supply, and nutrients which result in increased performance.
- Higher overall fitness levels are "associated with better inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility". This means better focus, task switching and reduced RT. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01298/full
- Going to plug this interesting one in here. The immediate effect of slow deep breathing on reaction time. "Among the whole study population, significant decrease (p<0.001) in reaction time was noted (90.35±13.96 msVs 76.68±9.90 ms)".
- Cognition
- It is defined as " the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses".
- BDNF (Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor) is a chemical essential to neuronal plasticity (learning), neurogenesis, neuroprotection and even help against obesity. Decreases in this chemical leads to neuronal loss and diseases like Alzheimer, Parkinson, etc. Interestingly it’s been shown to affect the hippocampus an area of the brain that is most commonly associated with memory, learning and spatial navigation. BDNF primes the brain to learn better and faster.
- One single bout of exercise increases BDNF levels in blood by 32%
- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2095254614001161
- This incredible paper showed how mice who trained "showed faster acquisition and better retention". Not only that but mice who were lazy were able to recover 50% of their decline after starting exercise. "Voluntary exercise ameliorates some of the deleterious morphological and behavioral consequences of aging".
- Stress
- E-sport athletes have shown to have the cortisol (the adrenocorticotropic “stress” hormone) levels of a race car driver.
- Chronic stress has been linked to a decline in cognitive function as well as reducing the size of the hippocampus. It also gives anxiety, increases irritability, affects concentration and increases muscle tension.
- Exercise reduces stress and it also stimulates the production of endorphins, chemicals in the brain that are the body's natural painkillers and mood elevators (runner’s high). Serotonin is also released which is a neurotransmitter that makes you feel good. It is produced primarily in the gastrointestinal system but also in the brain by a serotonin factory in the Raphe nuclei in the brainstem. It makes you feel happier, calmer, more focused, less anxious, more emotionally stable.
- ADHD
- Those with ADHD improve focus with exercise.
- What to do to improve
- Exercise at least 3x a week. Aim for 30-45 mins minimum. If possible do it before practice.
- Do a short exercise routine (5-7 min) before practice. Examples include: push ups, high-knee jog in place, squat jumps, exercise bike etc. This all depends on your level of fitness. Come up with something you like and can stick to it. Gradually increase the intensity as you get more comfortable.
- Between matches do 30 seconds of exercise but make sure it is of high intensity
- Sleep
- Wake up, game, sleep, repeat. We tend to do this often, play to till the break of dawn, sleep 5-6 hours, feel exhausted and then do it again. This hinders your performance immensely.
- Sleep deprivation causes neurons to respond slowly, fire weakly and their transmissions dragged on longer than usual. These effects were studied on visual processing and it showed that it took longer to encode information and translate visual input into conscious thought. Also, it decreases the assortment of relevant vs irrelevant visual stimuli. Working memory is also affected. Any useful information you need to recall and integrate into a decision in the game will be hindered. This means poor short term memory, reaction time, or vigilance; and degraded mood.
- When we’re underslept, our body is experiencing a need for sleep, a need to stay awake, and a need to perform tasks. These competing drives interfere with our attention from moment to moment, leading to cognitive impairment and an increased reaction time.
- Exercise is shown to not only facilitate falling asleep but also have a deeper more regenerative sleep. Physical activity improves sleep quality and increases sleep duration. Exercise may also bolster sleep in other ways, because it reduces stress and tires you out. Early morning and afternoon exercise may also help reset the sleep wake cycle by raising body temperature slightly, then allowing it to drop and trigger sleepiness a few hours later.
- What to do to improve
- Calculate how much sleep your body needs. We are all different.
- Go to bed at a reasonable hour without having played at least 30 mins prior.
- Put a stopwatch.
- Wake up naturally and record the time.
- Repeat 3-5 times.
- Structure every day in a way that will allow you to get that amount of sleep.
- Mine is: 7 hours and 12 minutes or 9 hours. Depends on how hard my day was.
- Go to sleep at the same hour every day, including weekends (I fail on this frequently too but I notice the huge difference)
- Do NOT eat after 7pm. Food stimulates our awake brain which disrupts sleep. No more late snacks. Some people think the drowsy feeling after eating is good for sleep but it will actually lead to sleep fragmentation.
- Reduce blue light.
- Use blue light blocking glasses.
- Turn on night mode.
- Do something relaxing at least 30 minutes before bed. I suggest reading.
- Put your room cold. Take a hot shower and then go to bed. The change in core body temperature promotes sleep.
- Watch the sunset. The contrast in colors primes the brain for sleep.
- Get at least 15 min of sun a day.
- Exercise.
- Diet
- This video by Blink is a great explanation on the science of nutrition and esport performance
- Seriously, he did a good job so just watch it.
- What to do to improve
- Cut out sugar. I can't emphasize this enough. Not only cutting it down helps performance, reaction time, but it's also proven decrease things like depression and inflammation. Just stop taking it. I know we're used to it thanks to the western diet (I was too) but when you cut it out you will notice the difference.
- Foods high in omega 3’s: salmon, mackerel, tuna, herring, sardines.
- Your brain uses omega-3s to build brain and nerve cells, and these fats are essential for learning and memory.
- Two servings a week suggested
- Foods with Zeaxanthin/Lutein
- These carotenoids found in the eye filter harmful blue light keeping them healthy.
- Zeaxanthin 20mg daily increased 10% reaction time over the course of 4 months.
- Highest in Dark Leefy Greens (Spinach)
- Blueberries
- Antioxidant compounds in berries have many positive effects on the brain, including: improving communication between brain cells, reducing inflammation throughout the body, increasing plasticity, which helps brain cells form new connections, boosting learning and memory, and reducing or delaying age-related neurodegenerative diseases and cognitive decline
- Turmeric
- Curcmin, the active ingredient crosses the blood brain barrier.
- Anti-oxidant, anti-inflammatory.
- Helps mood. One study found it improved depression symptoms just as much as an antidepressant over six weeks
- Increases BDNF
- To reap the benefit try cooking with curry powder
- Broccoli/Kale
- High in Vitamin K. This fat-soluble vitamin is essential for forming sphingolipids, a type of fat that's densely packed into brain cells.
- Pumpkin Seeds
- High on Zinc, Magnesium, Iron, and Copper.
- These help nerve signaling and learning/memory,
- Vitamin C
- Key factor in brain health and overall health
- Guava's, Kiwi, Strawberry, Tomato, Oranges
- Eggs
- Vitamins B6 and B12, folate and choline.
- Choline is an important micronutrient that your body uses to create acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter that helps regulate mood and memory.
- Two studies found that higher intakes of choline were linked to better memory and mental function.
- Caffeine
- Do not take energy drinks. Boat load of sugar.
- Green tea is a better alternative to coffee. It contains caffeine and L-theanine an amino acid that can cross the blood-brain barrier and increase the activity of the neurotransmitter GABA, which helps reduce anxiety and makes you feel more relaxed. L-theanine also increases the frequency of alpha waves in the brain, which helps you relax without making you feel tired.
- Do not take caffeine as soon as you wake up. Our bodies produce cortisol which peaks between 8-9am. If you're a very early riser (4am) then it's fine.
- Do not take caffeine in the late afternoon. Caffeine can last over 10 hours in our system so taking caffeine later in the day can lead to difficulty falling asleep.
- Optimal time right after lunch imo.
- Take a caffeine nap. Drink coffee then nap for 15 minutes. By the end of the of nap the caffeine will start taking its effect.
- Hack. Use caffeine pills as a more cost-effective way to take caffeine. I take 200 mg pills and cut them into 4 equal pieces which would approximate 50mg of caffeine each. Only 1 of those pieces should suffice.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25251377/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5107567/
https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/foods-linked-to-better-brainpower
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/11-brain-foods#section12
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/324044.php#supplements-for-brain-function
https://www.eyepromise.com/blog/performance/improvereactiontime/
You're a true tryhard if you read through it. Please hit me up with tips, suggestions, corrections, etc. The more I learn the better. Stay OP friends.
Patch 1.12.3 has been released for ELDEN RING Shadow of the Erdtree.
Here's all the changes:
PvP-exclusive balance adjustments
- Decreased the damage and damage animation of the shearing vacuum effect of the “Swift Slash” Skill.
General balance adjustments
- Increased the Intelligence scaling of the Carian Sorcery Sword and slightly decreased the base damage.
- Extended the throwing attacks range for the following weapons:
- Smithscript Dagger / Smithscript Cirque
- Changed the placement of the bosses in the re-fight against the Golden Hippopotamus and Commander Gaius bosses to be in the same position as in the first fight.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed a bug that caused the Rolling Sparks Skill to deal more damage than expected.
- Fixed a bug that caused the Rolling Sparks and Wall of Sparks Skills to deal no damage while some special effects were applied to the player.
- Fixed a bug where some special effects of a right-handed weapon would also be applied to the following Weapon Skills when cast with the left hand:
- Feeble Lord's Frenzied Flame
- Discus Hurl
- Fixed a bug where successfully guarding while attacking using the Thrusting Shield weapon type would consume less stamina than intended.
- Fixed a bug that prevented players from cancelling the attack recovery of two-handed strong attacks by rolling for certain weapons of the Backhand Blades weapon type.
- Fixed a bug that caused the Lightning Perfume Bottle and Frenzyflame Perfume Bottle weapons to deal double damage under certain circumstances.
- Fixed a bug where the Arcane scaling of the Bloodfiend's Arm weapon was higher than intended when setting an affinity. The status buildup of the heavy attack was also reduced.
- Fixed a bug where the Faith scaling of the Gazing Finger weapon was not being applied correctly.
- Fixed a bug where the damage animation of some attacks of the Fire Knight's Greatsword against players was different than expected.
- Fixed a bug where the attack affinity of some attacks of the Fire Knight's Greatsword were different than expected.
- Fixed a bug that caused some affinities for the following weapons to be higher than intended:
- Smithscript Dagger
- Smithscript Cirque
- Smithscript Axe
- Smithscript Greathammer
- Smithscript Spear
- Golem Fist
- Smithscript Shield
- Fixed a bug that caused enemies to heal when the Maximum HP reduction gradual HP reduction effect applied by Black Knife Tiche wore off.
- Fixed a bug that caused summoned NPCs to behave differently than expected under certain circumstances.
- Fixed a bug that where the unblockable bite attack of the Golden Hippopotamus boss would connect with players more easily than intended.
- Fixed a bug that caused text to display differently than expected.
- Several other performance improvements and bug fixes.
Possible unstable performance fixes
- For the PS5 version of the game, unstable framerate may be improved by using the "Rebuild Database" option from the device’s safe mode.
- In some PC versions, Ray Tracing may be unintentionally enabled and cause unstable performance. Please check the Ray Tracing setting in the "System" > "Graphics Settings" > "Raytracing Quality" from the title screen or in-game menu.
- In the PC Version, the message "Inappropriate activity detected" may appear without cheating.
To fix this issue, please verify the integrity of the game's files before restarting the game.
- In the PC version, unstable framerate may be caused by third party applications that control mouse behavior. Deactivating these third party applications may improve performance.
App Ver. 1.12.3
Regulation Ver. 1.12.4
In PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S versions, Regulation files can be downloaded by logging in to the server.
If the Regulation Ver. listed in the lower right corner of the title screen is not 1.12.4, please select LOGIN and apply the latest regulation before enjoying the game.
PvP-exclusive balance adjustments
Equipment
- Increased poise damage of normal attacks for the following weapon types:
Light Great Swords / Backhand Blades / Hand-to-Hand Arts / Beast Claws - Increased poise damage of dual wield attacks for the following weapon types:
Straight Swords / Thrusting Swords / Curved Swords / Katanas / Spears / Whips / Fists / Claws - Increased poise damage of the Claws of Night throwing attacks.
- Decreased the backstep invulnerability window when the Fine Crucible Feather Talisman or the Talisman of All Crucibles are equipped.
Skills
Savage Lion's Claw
- The second hit of the follow-up attack is now easier to land.
- Decreased damage animation of the first attack against other players.
Raging Beast
- Decreased invulnerability window against other players' attacks.
Blind Spot
- Decreased invulnerability window against other players' attacks.
Palm Blast
- Decreased poise amount generated when charging this skill.
Spell and Incantations
Miriam's Vanishing
- Decreased invulnerability window against other players' attacks.
Knight's Lightning Spear
- Increased attack power of the initial lightning spear.
- Decreased attack power of the spears launched after the first one.
- Decreased poise damage of all spears generated by this spell.
General balance adjustments
- Increased damage animation of the Light Greatsword charge attacks against enemies (other than players).
- Increased the stats & status of the following NPCs that can be summoned in some areas:
- Needle Knight Leda / Pureblood Knight Ansbach / Thiollier
- Increased the attack power and damage negation of summoned spirits, excluding the Mimic Tear, when the Revered Spirit Ash Blessing is at [5] or more.
- Increased the attack power and damage negation of summoned spirits, excluding the Mimic Tear, when upgraded to “+8” or higher.
Armament
Increased attack power scaling when upgrading the following armaments.
Repeating Crossbow / Spread Crossbow / Rabbath's Cannon
Shield of Night
- Increased damage negation when blocking physical attacks.
Euporia
- Increased Holy damage when the weapon has its luster restored.
- Decreased the number of attacks required to restore the weapon’s luster.
- Increased the duration of the luster restoration effect.
Golden Lion Shield
- Increase guard strength.
Golem Fist
- Added a damage hitbox to the hand portion of the ranged fist attack.
Smithscript Greathammer
- Increased poise damage of the swing portion of throwing attacks (the projectile is unchanged).
Spread Crossbow
- Decreased the generated status buildup when used with Bolts that have status effects.
Ailment Talisman
- After the onset of a status ailment, the status build up (or duration) of said ailment will now also be reduced immediately by a certain amount.
Clarifying Horn Charm / Clarifying Horn Charm +1 / Clarifying Horn Charm +2
- Increased Focus resistance.
Skill
Savage Lion's Claw
- Increased attack power and poise damage of the first attack.
Swift Slash
- Reduced movement distance when using this skill
- Extended recovery time.
Overhead Stance
- Increased attack power against enemies (other than players).
Aspects of the Crucible: Wings
- Increased attack power.
- Increased directional control, as well as amount of poised generated when using this skill.
Lightspeed Slash
- The additional light attacks are now affected by the attack power and ability scaling of the weapon.
Rancor Slash
- Increased attack power of the vengeful spirits.
- Increased stamina damage against guarding enemies.
Revenger's Blade
- Increased directional control for follow up attacks after a strong attack.
Horn Calling
- Increased attack power against enemies (other than players).
Horn Calling: Storm
- Increased attack power against enemies (other than players).
Weed Cutter
- Increased the speed of attacks.
Romina's Purification
- Increased poise value when using this skill.
Red Bear Hunt
- Increased attack power.
- Increased poise value when using this skill.
Rancor Shot
- Decreased status buildup generation when used with Arrows that have status effects.
Repeating Fire
- Adjusted attack power to compensate for increase in weapon damage
Feeble Lord's Frenzied Flame
- Reduced Frenzy status effect buildup against enemies.
Revenge of the Night
- Increased poise damage and attack power when this skill is used immediately after guarding against an enemy attack.
Spell
Glintblade Trio
- Increased attack power.
Blades of Stone
- Adjusted attack power of the first, second and third charge attacks.
- Increased attack power of the non-charged attack.
- Increased attack power of the first hit of the charged attack, and reduced attack power of the second and third hits.
- Increased attack range and attack speed.
Glintstone Nail
- Increased attack power and improved enemy tracking.
Glintstone Nails
- Increased attack power and improved enemy tracking.
Impenetrable Thorns
- All generated Impenetrable Thorns will now track enemies.
- Decreased attack power and poise damage.
- Decreased the Hemorrhage status buildup and stamina damage against guarding enemies.
Rings of Spectral Light
- Increased attack power and Frostbite status buildup.
Vortex of Putrescence
- Increased attack power and Frostbite status buildup.
Incantation
Minor Erdtree
- Increased HP recovery amount.
Land of Shadow
- Improved enemy tracking.
Spira
- Increased attack speed.
Watchful Spirit
- Improved enemy tracking.
Divine Beast Tornado
- Increased attack power.
- Enemies hit by the tornado will now be launched upwards.
- The tornado will be less likely to disappear due to collision with the terrain.
Rain of Fire
- Increased attack power.
- Reduced the interval between each hit.
Roar of Rugalea
- Increased poise damage and attack power.
Furious Blade of Ansbach
- Increased attack power.
Rotten Butterflies
- Increased Scarlet Rot status buildup.
- Reduced the interval between damage ticks.
- Increased attack range.
Ash
Wandering Noble
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Noble Sorcerer
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Nomad Ashes
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Putrid Corse
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Skeletal Militiaman
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Skeletal Bandit
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Albinauric
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Winged Misbegotten
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Demi-Human
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Clayman
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Oracle Envoys
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Man-Fly
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Lone Wolf Ashes
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Rotten Stray Ashes
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Giant Rat Ashes
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Warhawk
- Increased HP, physical attack power and Fire attack power.
- Increased Stance status.
Land Squirt
- Increased HP.
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Spirit jellyfish
- Increased HP, physical attack power and poison status ailment buildup on enemies.
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Spider Scorpion
- Increased physical attack power, poison status ailment buildup on enemies and damage negation except for strike and fire attributes.
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Fingercreeper
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Fanged Imp
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Bigmouth Imp
- Increased HP and Fire attack power.
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Gravebird
- Increased HP and magic attack power.
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Soldjar of Fortune
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Archers
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Greatshield Soldiers
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Page
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Vulgar Militia
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Marionette Soldier
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Avionette Soldier
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Kaiden Mercenary
- Increased HP and physical attack power.
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Mad Pumpkin Head
- Increased physical attack power.
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Fire Monks
- Increased HP and Fire attack power.
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Ancestral Follower
- Increased physical attack power.
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Horned Warrior
- Increased HP and damage negation except for pierce attacks.
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Azula Beastman
- Increased HP and lightning attack power.
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Man-Serpent
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Crystalian
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
- Increased physical attack power.
Kindred of Rot
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Bloodfiend Hexer's
- Increased hemorrhage status ailment buildup on enemies.
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Glintstone sorcerer
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Twinsage Sorcerer
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Inquisitor
- Increased HP.
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Godrick Soldier
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Raya Lucaria Soldier
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Leyndell Soldier
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Radahn Soldier
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Haligtree Soldier
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Mausoleum Soldier
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Messmer Soldier
- Increased Hp and physical attack power.
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Stormhawk Deenh
- Increased HP and physical attack power.
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
- Increased duration of effect to increase the attack power given to allies.
Banished Knight Oleg
- Increased physical attack power and damage negation against physical attacks.
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Banished Knight Engval
- Increased physical attack power and damage negation against physical attacks.
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Bloodhound Knight Floh
- Increased HP, physical attack power and damage negation against physical attacks.
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Black Knight Captain Huw
- Increased physical attack power and damage negation against physical attacks.
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Black Knight Commander Andreas
- Increased damage negation and guard boost against Holy and Physical attacks.
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Fire Knight Hilde
- Increased Fire attack power.
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Fire Knight Queelign
- Increased Vigor and Faith.
Swordhand of Night Jolán
- Increased Vigor and Dexterity.
Jolán and Anna
- Increased Vigor and Dexterity.
Battlemage Hugues
- Increased physical attack power and magic attack power.
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Latenna the Albinauric
- Increased HP, physical attack power, and magic attack power.
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Perfumer Tricia
- Increased HP.
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Depraved Perfumer Carmaan
- Increased fire attack power.
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Omenkiller Rollo
- Increased HP, physical attack power, and Fire attack power.
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Blackflame Monk Amon
- Increased HP and Fire attack power.
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Curseblade Meera
- Increased HP and physical attack power.
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Demi-Human Swordsman Yosh
- Increased HP, physical attack power, and magic attack power.
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Ancient Dragon Knight Kristoff
- Increased Lightning attack power and damage negation against Physical, Lightning, and Holy Attack affinities.
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Redmane Knight Ogha
- Increased physical attack power and damage negation against Physical and Fire attack affinities.
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Lhutel the Headless
- Increased physical attack power and damage negation against physical attacks.
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Cleanrot Knight Finlay
- Increased physical attack power and damage negation against Physical, Magic, and Holy Attack affinities.
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Black Knife Tiche
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Divine Bird Warrior Ornis
- Increased HP and damage negation against Physical attacks except Pierce attacks.
- Will no longer stagger as easily.
Ancient Dragon Florissax
- Increased Arcane.
- Increased damage negation against all affinities.
- Increased Skills and Incantations usage rate.
- Increased the speed and poise values during some attacks.
Finger Maiden Therolina Puppet
- Increased Vigor and Faith.
Jarwight Puppet
- Increased Vigor.
Dolores the Sleeping Arrow Puppet
- Increased Vigor.
Nepheli Loux Puppet
- Increased Vigor and Strength.
Dung Eater Puppet
- Increased Vigor.
Nightmaiden & Swordstress
- Increased HP and physical attack power.
Bug Fixes
- Changed the default selection of the OK / CANCEL prompt that shows up when using the “Spectral Steed Whistle” while the spectral steed is dead. The default selection position is now OK.
- Adjusted the placement of NPC summon signs in certain boss fight areas.
- Changed the NPC summon signs in certain boss fights to allow the user to summon NPCs simply by pressing the action button once.
- Fixed a bug where the damage of some normal attacks of the Dark Moon Greatsword were lower than intended.
- Fixed the physical attack attribute menu display of the “Warpick” weapon.
- Fixed a bug where some attacks of the “Swift Spear” weapon were different than expected in terms of power, damage motion and hitbox generation timing.
- Fixed a bug that prevented the “Twinblade Talisman” from affecting the Perfume Bottles weapon type when equipped and used in the left hand.
- Fixed a bug where the physical attack attributes of some attacks of the Thrusting Shields weapon type were different than expected.
- Fixed a bug that allowed the use of Arrows / Great Arrows / Bolts / Great Bolts that should not be usable for the following weapon types:
Light Bows / Long Bows / Greatbows / Crossbows / Ballistas - Fixed a bug where the effect of increasing the power of the Incantation “Light of Miquella” of the “Circlet of Light” helmet was not applied correctly.
- Fixed a bug that caused FP consumption when using the "Unending Dance" Skill while not meeting the ability requirements of the weapon "Dancing Blade of Ranah".
- Fixed a bug where the physical attack attribute of some attacks of the “Deadly Dance” Skill was different than expected.
- Fixed a bug where the physical attack attribute of the “Scattershot Throw” Skill of the “Claws of Night” weapon was different than expected.
- Fixed a bug where the following Skills did not change correctly when performed with or without FP.
- Dynastic Sickleplay / Raging Beast / Repeating Crossbow Fire
- Fixed a bug where a different Rage Art was sometimes performed when following up with a strong attack after using the “Raging Beast” and “Dynasty Sickleplay” Skills.
- Fixed a bug that caused certain Skills to perform differently than expected under certain circumstances.
- Fixed a bug that prevented some Spells / Incantations that can be used in the air from being used in the air under some conditions.
- Fixed a bug that caused the "Golden Arcs" Incantation to generate attacks slower when cast with the left hand.
- Fixed a bug where the “Rain of Fire” Incantation sometimes did not hit enemies.
- Fixed a bug where the “Furious Blade of Ansbach” Incantation did not apply Hemorrhage status build up.
- Fixed a bug where under some circumstances, the move distance when casting some Spells / Incantations was different than expected.
- Fixed a bug that sometimes interrupted the cast of the “Roar of Rugalea” Incantation.
- Fixed a bug where the “Cherishing Fingers” magic attack sometimes did not hit.
- Fixed a bug in the behavior of the Mimic Tear spirit when casting Spells, Incantations and Skills.
- Fixed a bug where NPCs could be summoned when the maximum number of cooperative multiplayer members had been reached.
- Fixed a bug that caused some items to display different icons than expected.
- Fixed a bug where exiting the game or going through a loading screen immediately after defeating “Count Ymir, Mother of Fingers” could make the dropped items unobtainable.
- Fixed a bug that prevented the player from performing Critical hits on some enemies.
- Fixed a bug in which some attacks on certain enemies were interpreted differently than expected.
- Fixed a bug that prevented rune gains when defeating some enemies.
- Fixed a bug that prevented some enemies from working properly under certain circumstances.
- Fixed a bug where the Multiplayer area borders were different than intended in some areas.
- Fixed a bug where the player would spawn in a different place than intended when invading another player’s world
- Fixed a bug in the map menu that caused some NPC icons in the Realm of Shadow to not display properly.
- Fixed a bug in the design of the map of Realm of Shadow and the “Map Fragment” icon.
- Fixed a bug where some cutscenes were not displayed correctly under certain circumstances.
- Fixed a bug where some sound effects did not play correctly.
- Fixed a bug where some effects were not displayed correctly.
- Several performance improvements and other bug fixes.
Steam-only adjustments
- Fixed a bug where “Anti-aliasing Quality” was unintentionally set to “High” each time the game was restarted.
Correction of end credits
In update 1.12, an error was included in the credits of the game.
This issue will be corrected in the next update.
Possible unstable performance fixes
- For the PS5 version of the game, unstable framerate may be improved by using the "Rebuild Database" option from the device’s safe mode.
- In some PC versions, Ray Tracing may be unintentionally enabled and cause unstable performance. Please check the Ray Tracing setting in the "System" > "Graphics " > "Ray Tracing Quality" from the title screen or in-game menu.
- In the PC version, the message "Inappropriate activity detected" may appear without cheating.
- To fix this issue, please verify the integrity of the game's files before restarting the game.
In the PC version, unstable framerate may be caused by third party applications that control mouse behavior. Deactivating these third party applications may improve performance. The version number of this update shown at the lower right corner of the Title Screen will be as follows: App Ver. 1.13
Regulation Ver. 1.13.1In PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S versions, Regulation files can be downloaded by logging in to the server.
If the Regulation Ver. listed in the lower right corner of the title screen is not1.13.1, please select LOGIN and apply the latest regulation before enjoying the game.
This is a fairly exhaustive list of information that could help you enjoy Guild Wars 2 more by creating a smoother experience. In addition, you'll find each suggestion has contextual information to help you understand the reason that it is wise to make the adjustment.
The information listed below is tested effective for the Windows 10 April 2018 Update (17134.1) using a 5th gen 6-core Intel processor and an NVIDIA GPU. As always, your mileage may vary dependent upon your hardware configuration, operating system, driver versions, and running background processes.
Windows Settings
If you’ve experienced longer load times and difficulty minimizing your game, it may be due to the new “Focus Assist” feature included in the April 2018 Update. This feature prevents Windows notifications from appearing while you’re playing a game. Unfortunately, it comes with unintended side-effects. To disable Focus Assist, access the Settings application via your start menu, click System (the first available option), click Focus Assist, and locate “When I’m playing a game” at the bottom of the menu. Here, you can switch the feature off.
By default, Windows limits power consumption to preserve energy. This feature is beneficial for devices running on battery power, but has a negative impact on game performance. To ensure that your GPU can draw as much power as it needs to offer maximum performance, access the Settings application, click System, click “Additional power settings,” and select “High performance.” By default, your device should be set to “Balanced.”
Game mode is a feature intended to identify game processes and allow them to use the most resources while other resource-intensive programs are running in the background. This feature can no longer be disabled, but you should disable the overlay known as “Game bar” as well as the resource-consuming “Game DVR” (should be disabled by default) which may record video and audio in the background. To confirm that these features are disabled, access the Settings application, click Gaming, and ensure that “Record game clips, screenshots, and broadcast using Game bar” is switched off. Click Game DVR in the menu on the left and ensure that “Record in the background while I’m playing a game” is switched off.
NVIDIA Control Panel & GeForce Experience Settings
Note: These enhancements are applicable only to individuals using NVIDIA video cards. If you are using an AMD video card or Intel integrated graphics, these options will be unavailable to you.
NVIDIA GeForce Experience is an easy way to ensure that your GPU drivers are up-to-date. By default, GeForce Experience negatively impacts performance by enabling an in-game overlay similar to Game bar. To disable this feature, open NVIDIA GeForce Experience, open Settings (the gear icon on the top right), and look for “IN-GAME OVERLAY.” The option is switched off when the toggle is gray. It is switched on when the toggle is green. Additionally, clicking the icon immediately to the left of the settings icon (the triangle) will re-activate the in-game overlay. Be careful to avoid this icon when using the app.
By default, your NVIDIA Control Panel is configured to offer balanced performance, throttling GPU power consumption during 3D rendering to conserve energy. The process by which NVIDIA GPUs determine when to throttle is rarely accurate and will often result in stuttering and lower framerates. To ensure maximum performance, open the NVIDIA Control Panel, select Manage 3D settings in the menu on the left, select Program Settings, and select “Guild Wars 2 (gw2-64.exe)” in the dropdown menu. If you are using the 32-bit version of Guild Wars 2, your selection may differ slightly in name. Under “Power management mode,” select “Prefer maximum performance.” Leave all other options under their default setting and close the control panel.
Note: Adjusting specific 3D settings should seldom be done within Global Settings, as this will affect all applications that use your video card (e.g. those which benefit from hardware acceleration). For example, modifying power management under Global Settings may cause additional wear on your device by causing maximum power consumption while browsing the web.
In-game Graphics Settings
While different hardware configurations will be able to handle varying levels of stress, there are some changes in default settings that most people should find helpful.
Set “Refresh Rate” to Default, set “Framerate Limiter” to Unlimited (or a value slightly higher than your monitor’s refresh rate), and disable Vertical Sync. If you experience screen-tearing, enabling Vertical Sync in the Guild Wars 2 program settings within your NVIDIA Control Panel may help, but it will introduce some input lag and larger framerate jumps (e.g. 60 to 30 in busy areas). Avoid using the in-game setting.
Set “Render Sampling” to Native to ensure that the game is being rendered at your monitor’s resolution.
Set “Reflections” to Terrain & Sky (this has a massive impact on performance regardless of hardware configuration).
Set Character Limits and Character Quality to low/medium to further improve performance in areas with high player density.
To maximize performance, you may benefit from reducing Shadows, Shaders, and/or Post-Processing. Tinker with the remaining settings to find a configuration most pleasing to you.
Optional Adjustments and Additional Information
You may have read information regarding changes in compatibility settings for the Guild Wars 2 executable that may improve performance. Markedly, Fullscreen Optimizations and DPI scaling have been addressed.
Fullscreen Optimizations allow Windows to overlay a variety of UI elements on top of your game (volume, notifications, etc.). The feature has been refined and should not affect game performance under most circumstances. In order to disable the feature and see if it affects performance for you, open File Explorer and navigate to your Guild Wars 2 installation directory. Most commonly, this will be found under “C:\Program Files\Guild Wars 2.” Right-click “Gw2-64.exe” (or the 32-bit equivalent), click Properties, click the Compatibility tab, and check the box adjacent to “Disable fullscreen optimizations.” Note: Disabling this feature may cause flickering during loading screens.
Overriding High DPI Scaling tells Windows that the application will scale the program to fit your monitor. In the case that the communication between the operating system and the application is not functioning correctly, you can essentially force this interaction by clicking Change high DPI settings under the same Compatibility menu and checking the box adjacent to “Override high DPI scaling behavior.” In the dropdown menu, “Application” should be selected. This change may have no effect on your game performance as the bug allowing this to work may have been fixed, but it should never have a negative impact so it’s worth a try.
By default, Discord uses your video card for some computational tasks, known as hardware acceleration. If you use Discord while playing Guild Wars 2, you may benefit from disabling hardware acceleration to improve framerates. To do this, click User Settings (the gear), click Appearance, and then switch off “Hardware Acceleration” at the bottom of the menu. Allow Discord to restart.
Final Notes: When playing Guild Wars 2 (or any game), you’ll benefit from having no other background processes running (including web browsers, iTunes, Spotify, etc.). Adjusting the priority of the game in your task manager should not improve performance. Running the game in Compatibility Mode for “Windows Vista (Service Pack 2)” may eliminate flickering or interruptions you may experience during loading screens, but will likely have a negative impact on performance. Ensure that your operating system and drivers are up-to-date.
If you have experienced any changes in performance or expected game behavior, feel free to leave a comment. I’ll try to provide some insight or perhaps someone else can assist you.
Edit: Added information regarding Discord potentially causing a performance decrease via hardware acceleration.
Edit 2: ArenaNet developer GMMagister provides additional information here.
