How to improve FPS in Hades II (PC)
Hades II is Supergiant Games's isometric action roguelike, with hand-drawn 2D art and a proprietary engine (the same technological lineage as Hades I). Graphically it's a lightweight game: there's no 3D geometry to render, no complex dynamic shadows, no ray tracing. The real bottleneck isn't texture resolution or lighting, but the number of sprites, particles, and effects that pile up on screen during advanced fights, especially when you chain Boons that generate projectiles, summons, or chained effects from several gods at once. The game was in Early Access from May 2024 with frequent performance patches, and reached version 1.0 with a solid optimization baseline inherited from Supergiant's strong technical reputation with the first Hades.
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Calculations based on our FPS model combined with the % gain of each setting (measured in public benchmarks).
1. Quick wins (no visual loss)
Start here. Each one adds a little, but together they give +22% free FPS.
FPS Limit
Being a very lightweight 2D game for the GPU, it's easy for the framerate to spike well above the monitor's refresh rate in exploration rooms, generating tearing and unnecessary power/heat, especially on laptops. Capping it to your screen's refresh rate doesn't affect perceived smoothness and reduces thermal throttling during the most demanding combat sequences.
V-Sync
V-Sync adds perceptible input lag in an action game with precisely timed dodge rolls. Since Hades II rarely struggles to exceed the monitor's refresh rate, it's preferable to use the built-in FPS limiter instead of traditional V-Sync.
Full-Screen Effects (Screen Shake / Flash)
It isn't a raw FPS gain as such, but a reduction of per-frame post-processing load during the highest particle-density moments (several Boons detonating at once). On tight systems (iGPU, laptops), lowering these effects reduces perceptible micro-hitches during combat peaks.
Particle Quality / Visual Effects
It's the setting with the biggest real impact in this specific game, because Hades II's bottleneck isn't texture resolution but the number of simultaneous particles on screen during stacked builds with chained Boons. Lowering this quality directly reduces load spikes in the most chaotic fights, which is where the FPS drop is really felt.
Render Resolution
Unlike 3D games, lowering resolution in Hades II barely frees up performance because the GPU load never came from heavy pixel shading, but from the number of sprites/particles drawn. The savings are minimal compared to the aesthetic damage in a game whose art direction is a central part of the experience.
2. Medium impact settings
Here's where most of the FPS is. Minor visual impact, major performance impact.
Antialiasing
Edge smoothing on hand-drawn 2D art with very defined lines has a proportionally higher cost relative to the rest of the rendering than in a standard 3D game. On integrated GPUs it's one of the settings that makes the most difference when lowered, though it introduces some visible jaggedness on character outlines.
Display Mode
Borderless windowed mode adds an OS compositing layer that in Hades II translates into somewhat less consistent frame pacing during particle spikes. Exclusive mode avoids that extra layer, at the cost of somewhat slower alt-tab focus switching.
Background Effects in Exploration Rooms (Parallax/Ambient)
Hades II's exploration zones (Oceanus, the Dark Forest) use fairly detailed animated parallax layers for ambiance that, while not the main bottleneck, do add constant CPU/GPU load in scenes already loaded with vegetation and weather effects.
Third-Party Overlays (Discord, GeForce Experience, etc.)
In a game with CPU spikes during massive particle and enemy spawns, any additional overlay competes for CPU cycles at the worst possible moment. The impact is small but consistent in the occasional drops reported by users.
3. Upscaling (DLSS / FSR / XeSS)
The biggest gain in the game. Compatible with almost any modern GPU.
4. Tips by GPU
NVIDIA
- •Enable Low Latency Mode (Ultra) in the NVIDIA Control Panel to reduce input lag in precise dodge combat, since Hades II has no native DLSS or Reflex.
- •Don't force DLSS or DLDSR via the control panel: being a proprietary 2D engine without support, it can generate artifacts on the hand-drawn art lines instead of improving performance.
- •Setting Power Management Mode to "Prefer Maximum Performance" avoids micro-stutters during combat particle spikes on mid-range GPUs that sometimes downclock under light loads.
AMD
- •Enable Radeon Anti-Lag to offset the input lag from borderless windowed mode if you prefer playing that way for multitasking convenience.
- •There's no need to enable Radeon Boost or FSR: the game is GPU-light and these upscaling technologies provide no real benefit in a 2D title without official support.
- •On Radeon iGPUs (laptops with an APU), lower particle quality and antialiasing first: they're the two settings with the biggest real impact on this hardware.
Sistema
- •Close CPU-intensive background processes (browsers with many tabs, streaming clients): Supergiant's proprietary engine relies fairly heavily on a single CPU thread for particle and collision logic.
- •Install the game on SSD if possible: while asset loading isn't heavy, room transitions and biome screens benefit from shorter load times, especially in long runs.
- •Always update to the latest game version: Supergiant published several performance patches during Early Access (2024) focused specifically on reducing FPS drops with stacked Boon builds, and 1.0 incorporates those baseline improvements.
5. Known game issues
FPS drops with heavily stacked Boon builds
In advanced runs with Boon combinations that generate multiple simultaneous projectiles or summons (for example, Zeus builds with lightning chains, or Aphrodite Boons with status effects on several enemies at once), some players report occasional framerate drops during the highest particle-density peaks, more noticeable on the surface of Erebus with multiple enemies on screen.
Occasional stuttering on room transitions
Some users reported micro-hitches when entering new rooms during Early Access, attributed to asset streaming and background shader compilation. Supergiant reduced the frequency of these episodes with successive patches through 2024 and in the 1.0 update.
Estado: 1.0
6. Frequently asked questions
Does Hades II need a powerful GPU?▾
Why does my framerate drop only in late-game fights and not during exploration?▾
Does it make sense to enable DLSS or FSR in Hades II?▾
Is Supergiant still optimizing the game after the 1.0 launch?▾
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Calculate FPS for Hades II →Calculations based on consensus of technical sources and our own FPS model. More about our methodology →