Summary
- Older CPUs might not be able to run Helldivers 2 due to recent optimizations.
- AVX2 instructions are now a requirement for gameplay, causing crashing issues on processors below the minimum requirements.
- Developer Arrowhead Studios is working on a fix, but it may not support non-AVX2 CPUs moving forward.
Helldivers 2 remains wildly popular, commonly sitting among the most-played games on Steam. A recent update to the game is apparently causing issues for players with older CPUs, however, as reported by Eurogamer. Developer Arrowhead Studios has acknowledged the issue and says it's working on a fix, but CPUs that worked previously with the game have suddenly started crashing whenever players start a mission.
Despite the controversies, I love Helldivers 2
Released back in February 2024, Helldivers 2 attracted a lot of attention from the gaming community when Sony mandated PC gamers to sign in to PSN accounts. Besides the whole data-collecting nature of this vile move, Sony locked thousands of players living in PSN-restricted countries out of Helldivers 2. That's a real shame because Helldivers 2 is a solid multiplayer game. For someone who spends most of his gaming hours inside single-player game worlds, Helldivers 2 had me hooked from the get-go. Calling down an Orbital Laser on an unsuspecting automation base never gets old, and the same can be said for eliminating a charger with a well-placed resupply pod.
Older CPUs might not be able to run Helldivers 2
Even if they could a year ago
Over the past couple of days, a growing number of Helldivers 2 players have reported hard crashes in the game's Discord server. Players speculated about the cause of these crashes, eventually coming up with the theory that recent optimizations to the game have put a hard requirement on using a CPU with support for AVX2 instructions. That's now been confirmed by Arrowhead Studios, which added the crashing problem to its list of known issues.
AVX, or Advanced Vector Extensions, have been in consumer desktop CPUs since 2011, with AVX2 first receiving support from Intel in 2013. AMD, on the other hand, didn't support AVX2 until 2015. The minimum system requirements for Helldivers 2 call for an Intel Core i7-4790K or AMD Ryzen 5 1500X, both of which support AVX2 instructions. Some users are encountering crashes on processors above the minimum requirements, but most have focused on older CPUs that could run the game previously but were otherwise below the minimum requirements.
It's quickly becoming somewhat of a joke in the troubleshooting channel of the Helldivers 2 discord, with prominent community members like Birby becoming increasingly direct with users who fall below the minimum requirements. "Yeah, I'm afraid your 12 year old processor can't handle live service games like Helldivers 2," they wrote in reference to a user running an Intel Xeon E5-1680. As you might suspect, that chip doesn't support AVX2 instructions.
On Reddit, one user claimed that the most recent update to the game switched from AVX instructions to AVX2 instructions, and that's the source of the crash. That would make sense. Helldivers 2 is a live service game that's constantly seeing new content, so it's not surprising that systems that could barely hold the game together before are now crashing.
Arrowhead says it's working on a fix, but it may not be able to support CPUs without AVX2 support moving forward. AVX2 has been around for a decade, and in the case of Intel CPUs, for 12 years, so there's not much of an excuse to support those chips today. It looks like Arrowhead is trying to, but if you've been stuck with crashes, you might want to take a look at our roundup of the best gaming CPUs.