I recently bought Helldivers 2 and noticed that my CPU seems to be limiting my RTX 3060. Other games, including Red Dead Redemption 2, War Thunder, and Star Wars Battlefront II, run well at high settings. My system has an Intel i7-4790, an RTX 3060, and 28 GB of RAM. I have already tried various game, Windows, and performance optimizations. Increasing GPU-heavy settings to Ultra only improved performance by around 5–8 FPS, and I currently get about 40 FPS. Is there anything meaningful I can do to reduce the CPU bottleneck without replacing my hardware?
4 Answers
Check how you determined that the CPU is the bottleneck. Monitor CPU and GPU usage, individual CPU-core usage, temperatures, and frame times rather than looking only at overall utilization. Also make sure the memory is running correctly and that no unnecessary background tasks are active. The 28 GB configuration is unusual, but it is not automatically the cause; the old CPU is the more likely limitation.
Frame-generation software such as Lossless Scaling might make motion appear smoother if your system has enough headroom, but it will not increase the game's actual CPU performance or solve the underlying bottleneck. Lowering GPU settings also usually has little effect when the processor is the limiting component.
At around 40 FPS, you may already be getting about what that processor can deliver in this game. A budget platform upgrade, such as a Ryzen 5 3600 or a newer equivalent with compatible DDR4 memory and a reasonably priced motherboard, would provide a noticeable improvement. You could potentially sell the existing motherboard, CPU, and memory to offset some of the cost.
Helldivers 2 is fairly CPU-heavy, and the i7-4790 is a four-core, eight-thread processor from an older platform. There is no real setting that can remove a CPU bottleneck. Disabling unnecessary background programs may recover a few frames, but a newer CPU, motherboard, and RAM would be the proper solution.
That makes sense. I was hoping there might be a setting I had missed, but it sounds like the processor is simply reaching its limit.
The processor's age and its four-core design are probably the main issue here, especially in large fights. Memory configuration is worth checking, but changing it alone is unlikely to transform performance.