Originally posted by Trakehner:

Man. Send everyone that has a 3000 series cards is or was having issues with the game. But just you. Hopefully someone can help us out. I run an old 1080 and have no issues beyond the small lag spikes at world saves. GL to you. Hope you get it worked out.

Same with my 1080ti, I find it hilarious because I can run most new games maxxed out (barring ray tracing, which i don't care about). HH update is no problamo for me.

@ Druid thanks for the suggestion but clearing the IronGate registry keys had no effect on load time or performance. I don't think these registry keys are actually used for anything other than system paths. This makes some sense as I have actually uninstalled the game and reinstalled to other available SSD drives ( I have 9x 2TB drives and I tried 3 of them to test) and found no solution after the H&H update. The game is just broken for me at this point.

WARNING: Post is very long and technical.

No issues here; playing on a 1080Ti, driver version 456.71. Game is installed on a Samsung 970 EVO M.2 SSD. (Secondary drive)

The only few pieces of advice I can offer you and anyone else having issues with hardware like that are as follows:

1. You've already completed all the hardware and software (OC) related things I'd recommend first. Good job there. However, try popping up the nVidia Control Panel and see if Valheim has its own entry listed in the "Manage 3D Settings" section. If you don't see it listed there, add it and try running the game again.

I've seen the lack of a game in this list cause similar issues before, though not on 30-series cards and not with this game. If the game is listed there, and you've made any changes to it (or global changes), revert everything to default if you haven't tried already. This includes using that other nVidia-related program whose name I can't recall at the moment. (Though a "Clean Install" with the nVidia installer may wipe all profiles and settings anyway.)

This is important because these are driver-level changes that will superede anything you have set in-game, and can cause conflicts. (Such as forcing anti-aliasing in a game that doesn't support it.)

2. If you're using "GeForce Experience" or any other program to update your video drivers for you, stop letting software do this. It can and often will cause issues, although the issues it can cause are often BSODs. This also includes letting Windows Update install them for you.

3. You mentioned clean installs of the driver you're using.. when you say "clean install", did you simply run the installer again and allow it to do its thing? There's a very lengthy and annoying process to make sure your video driver installations are handled properly. Any tech forum anywhere will recommend you do this, so I'll list the process below as best as I can remember it.

Note that this does involve disconnecting from the internet and booting in to Safe Mode at least one time. Also, albeit optional, you can use "DriverSweeper" during this process, as it takes care of a few steps automatically (file remnant removal, registry entries, etc.).

1. Download a known stable version of your driver (and DriverSweeper if you're going to use it). Often the newest version isn't the best to use, especially in nVidia's case. They rely a lot on their community to flatten bugs and get a stable release out. Save this file somewhere easy to access, like your desktop.

2. Disconnect from the internet to prevent things from updating your driver for you, or turn all of that off. Now, start uninstalling anything nVidia, with the Display Driver last. Obviously this is going to cause your display to weird out and revert to the Windows default display adapter driver, which is fine. It may ask for a reboot first and then install the default driver, which is fine.

NOTE: If you happen to have an nVidia Chipset, do NOT uninstall this driver (the chipset drivers), or allow DriverSweeper or anything else to do so. You ONLY want to deal with your display driver.

3A. Reboot to Safe Mode (no networking). While in Safe Mode, if you're using DriverSweeper, run it now and allow it to remove anything it finds nVidia-related. Have it reboot to Safe Mode again once it's complete, or just have it remove everything and reboot to Safe Mode yourself after checking one more thing. It may force a reboot, I forget.

3B. If not using DriverSweeper, while in Safe Mode you're going to want to:

A. Remove any and all nVidia-related directories, including things that may be in the Temp folder(s).
B. Scour the Registry and remove anything "nVidia" you can find. As far as I know, it's all tagged with "nVidia" somewhere, so simply searching and removing the keys yourself should be sufficient. You want to be pretty careful doing this if you aren't used to altering the Registry, though.

4. The "one more thing" you want to check is in the Device Manager. Open it, click "View" up top, and select the "Show Hidden Devices" option. Now, look at your Display Adapters on the left. Do you see any grayed out items? If you do, remove them all. If all you see is the "Windows Default Display Adapter" you should be fine. Make sure anything you remove is under "Display Adapters" and nowhere else.

5. Reboot once more in to Safe Mode. Now comes the installation. Right-click on the driver installer and run it as an administrator. Once it loads up and you're able to start making selections, select a "Custom Install" and also tick the "Clean Install" box just for S&Gs. (At this point it should have nothing to clean, however.)

NOTE2: If you're unable to install the driver in Safe Mode for whatever reason, you should be okay to install it during a normal boot as long as you have no internet access, or nothing is going to try and update your drivers automatically. I can't express enough how much of a bad move this is.

6. When you're given the selection as to what to install, select ONLY the PhysX driver. The Display Driver will auto-install by default and as far as I know you can't untick it. Don't install the "HD Audio" crap nVidia offers you unless you absolutely have to have it and use it already.

7. Once done, you're free to boot regularly, with internet access. Just don't let anything update your driver for you if it offers to.

You should now be 100% free of any and all potential conflicts with your video driver. Old remnants left behind has been known to cause issues. The step involving the Device Manager is particularly important, as I had once found remnants for a GTX570 I had installed much, much later after having upgraded to a GTX760. (This is back in the day, mind you.)

While rare, it can and has happened. If you're a stickler for system stability like I am, this is unfortunately a necessary evil to slay when you either want to or are forced to (looking at you, Doom Eternal..) update your video driver. Sadly, I sincerely doubt nVidia's own installer follows these steps.

All of that mess aside, the only other thing I can offer is that it might be a 30-series card problem. I'm still seeing stuff all over the internet from folks with 30-series cards having issues with otherwise non-demanding games, or games the card can readily handle.

Despite the cost of those cards, almost every manufacturer is guilty of using cheap components in their construction. There are teardown videos from basically everyone (Jay, Linus, GamerNexus, etc.) that will show you specifically what they've done.

ONE LAST WARNING: if you have an EVGA "FTW3" 3090 in particular, be VERY CAREFUL of anything that might over-volt the card. Amazon's "New World" MMORPG has bricked a legion of these cards due to the aforementioned crap components that were used. (I believe related to an issue where frame limits were not in place, but has since been patched. It was with the game's beta specifically.)

ANYWAYS.. good luck.

Thanks Requimatic, I snipped your list of things I had tried before I even started listing what I thought was so important for the developer to notice. I do not use the Geforce Experience app for any purpose and my physx driver install is handled separately cleared with the driver cleaner sourced from guru3d. I guess I assumed this was obvious but I should have been more through. During a clean install I am wiping all traces of the nvidia drivers using the same driver cleaner.
I'd like to think that I handled every possible issue but the fact that ONLY Valheim H&H is affected and ONLY after the H&H update I'm not inclined to see this as an external issue.

Here are a few more ideas.

1. Try clearing and/or disabling Steam and Nvidia's shader cache. I'd try one at a time and see if it fixes it. Uninstalling Valheim and Nvidia drivers probably cleared them already but it's worth a shot.

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\shadercache\892970
C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\NVIDIA

2. Try forcing exclusive fullscreen with -window-mode exclusive -screen-fullscreen launch parameters.

3. Disable any overlays (steam, discord, RTSS, etc.).

Thanks again Druid I appreciate it.
I'm going to try a few more of these options but I'm focused on handling the stuff I thought I previously addressed that Requiematic pointed out. I tried to be thorough in my documentation of the problem but we can't expect help that way. I can't stress enough that I have no overlay apps or other cruft installed. edit: note I did post my dxdiag
At this point I have wiped my HDD and flattened a windows 10 install partition and reinstalled ONLY the nvidia driver and important system drivers and the intel LAN driver for network access. I'm actually posting from my phone because I didn't even install firefox to access steam forums. From a system with nothing but steam and Valheim installed with the most recent nvidia driver it took 11 MINUTES to load Valheim with no gamesave. The beginning dialog was crawling up the screen and took about 3 minutes to complete before the crow model finally dropped my clean character at the spawn location. Then I was immediately killed because nearby lizards were attacking long before my screen even showed them at approx 4 FPS. The game is unplayable.

On the same windows install for comparison, since it's a game I'm used to the way it performs to avoid ambiguity. I just went ahead and installed Cyberpunk 2077, at a minimum I am seeing 90FPS in a dense city area and load times under 7 seconds between areas. CP2077 isn't as fun as I hoped but it loads and plays.

as weird as it sounds, did you tried max settings aswell? ;) i had the problem with few games running low fps because i turned town every option, using high settings got me better FPS in some games since my GPU now works more, and since my bottleneck is the CPU, it could be a correlation between those. not sure about this, but it definitely helped in cpu heavy games for me. all the best!

Hi 𒆜FabzŇ :) actually that was one of the first things I tried. It wouldn't be the first time maxxing setting that way could fix things. Unfortunately not this time, I was playing on maxxed settings before the patch. That was the settings I was used to playing with :/ I did post everything I tried previously but if you have any other ideas I'd like to hear. Not a boast but my rig should be capable of much more then running this game.

At this point I feel I have eliminated hardware and OS settings, 2 different NV driver versions including the most recent, 2 different motherboard firmware and steam/windows software. A Complete OS flatten and reinstall is where I think most even dedicated gamers give up but I still want to play Valheim. I don't see what else there is I can change at this point. Every other game plays fine, a couple games like Command and Conquer actually play better after the reinstall but I don't see this as help for Valheim, something really strange is going on with this game.

I'd like to be able to play Valheim eventually so here to hoping the devs figure it out hjh

Man. Send everyone that has a 3000 series cards is or was having issues with the game. But just you. Hopefully someone can help us out. I run an old 1080 and have no issues beyond the small lag spikes at world saves. GL to you. Hope you get it worked out.

Thanks Trakehner. After you pointed out about your 1080 not having issues. I should point out that I just tried installing on my old laptop (with 3+ years ago nvidia 1070) now has better performance in Valheim than my main PC. Very odd situation.

I'm sorry about posting this here previously. I just found out there's another different bug forum available to post this type of problem. (I assumed this should be better advertised after a major patch but -sigh- oh well, looking for help but the money is already spent)
I'm leaving this here in case anyone else in my situation runs into the same problem, I'm sorry I don't have a link to a Valheim solution right now.

If you're comfortable deleting stuff from the registry, Valheim stores settings and keybinds there for whatever (dumb) reason. You could try clearing that.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\IronGate\Valheim

@Druid That's something I wasn't aware of, I'll give it a shot. Without changing anything just now I'm curious why IronGate felt it necessary to put anything at all from a game like this directly in the windows registry when it seems totally unnecessary as Unity can hold all local system variables (that's one of the main selling points of Unity). v0v

Originally posted by Druid:

If you're comfortable deleting stuff from the registry, Valheim stores settings and keybinds there for whatever (dumb) reason. You could try clearing that.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\IronGate\Valheim

WHAT?! Why does a game save stuff in one of the hardest place to clear? (for computer noobs like me, i mean)

Originally posted by The n00b A:

WHAT?! Why does a game save stuff in one of the hardest place to clear? (for computer noobs like me, i mean)

It's not that it's strange to include such a thing in the Windows registry, that's just how some things work. Mainly this is an issue that it seems totally undocumented for a game that's being developed this way; but I don't know if it's detrimental if the suggestion from Druid helps.

In other words... Don't jump on them just for using the Windows registry the way Microsoft intended. That's just what happens with non open-source Operating System software, (you don't get to legally know what they're doing.) In a perfect gaming world we would all be running our favorite version of linux and we would never have to worry about private graphics API's like directx. Give it time. PC gaming is still so much better than buying a new console and rebuying all the games you already bought every 2-3 years because sony or nintendo or microsoft added a couple of new characters. But that's a different thing altogether. I'll gladly put up with some pains from Valheim even if it means I need to wait a bit for them to catch up with my hardware.