Fix Destiny 2 Performance Issues On AMD GPUs With This Simple Workaround
The last thing you want when splurging on a newfangled graphics card is to experience stuttering and other performance issues in games. Nevertheless, some Radeon GPU owners have been experiencing this very thing in Destiny 2 after the launch of the Beyond Light expansion. This has even been occurring on AMD's Radeon RX 6000 series. If you're affected by this, there are a couple of workarounds you can try.
Well, technically there are three workarounds, if you count selling or returning your shiny new graphics card and buying an NVIDIA GeForce GPU instead. But now is not the greatest time to try such a thing—graphics cards are in short supply and thus very difficult to obtain, unless you're willing to pay grossly inflated prices on eBay and Craigslist. No thanks.
The problem that seems to have started with Beyond Light is that performance tends to dip dramatically in some cases. Users have especially noticed this in Tangled Shore areas, like Thieves' Landing, where framerate drops can be frustratingly common. Have a look...
In some cases, users would see their game performance drop to around 40 frames per second at lower resolutions, even though their hardware should be capable of much faster framerates.
"Ever since the release of Beyond Light, the performance of Destiny 2 has been atrocious. In January there was something of a fix on NVIDIA GPUs, but since January 29th, there has not been an update," Reddit user JirayD wrote in a recent thread.
So, what can you do? One of the temporary workarounds is to revert back to an older GPU driver. According to JirayD, applying AMD's Radeon 20.4.2 driver gives a performance boost of up to around 50 percent, compared to what it has been since the Beyond Light expansion. We have not tried this ourselves, but if you're tired of pulling your hair out over this issue, you can give it a whirl.
The second workaround applies to owners of a Radeon RX 6000 series card. It involve editing the game's cvars.xml file. To do this, close Destiny 2 then head to C:\Users\[Your User Name]\Appdata\Roaming\Bungie\DestinyPC\prefs\ (change "C:" to whatever drive Destiny is on, if it resides elsewhere).
Once there, right-click on cvars.xml and open it with WordPad, Notepad++, or another text editor. Then apply the following edit:
<cvar=name="force_enable_multi-threaded_render_submit" value="1"/>
This is based on the theory that Destiny 2's multi-threaded renderer is borked. However, we have not tested this edit either, so we can't say what impact it actually has on performance, or whether it fixes framerate drops and stuttering. If you give it a try, though, we'll cross our fingers it works out.
