First of all the graphics are gorgeous in this game if you take two seconds to look beyond the pixelated art style, they just have a particular style that doesn't appeal to everyone. It's hard to argue about how awesome the forest can look with the sun shining through, but if you're worried about slightly fuzzy pixelated textures then you're missing the beauty.

Second - if you've got 8 gig of RAM you're at the minimum for this game. If your system is eating up a significant amount of RAM for anything else then you're going to have a bad time running Valheim.

2 gig of video RAM is low these days. Does your card meet or exceed the minimums noted below? Amount of VRAM isn't the only thing you have to think about.

MINIMUM:
Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
OS: Windows 7 or later
Processor: 2.6 GHz Quad Core or similar
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Graphics: GeForce GTX 950 or Radeon HD 7970
DirectX: Version 11
Storage: 1 GB available space

RECOMMENDED:
Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
OS: Windows 7 or later
Processor: i5 3GHz or Ryzen 5 3GHz
Memory: 16 GB RAM
Graphics: GeForce GTX 1060 or Radeon RX 580
DirectX: Version 11
Network: Broadband Internet connection
Storage: 1 GB available space

Have you tried double alt-enter? Seems to help with FPS by forcing fullscreen mode. Have you tweaked your shadows setting down a few notches? Turned off some of the special graphics enhancements to see if that helps? Tried to keep terraforming to a minimum? Stopped putting 100 torches all over your base? Verified your game files? Made sure the game is in your anti-virus and firewall exceptions? Just a few suggestions that could help boost performance. I was having some issues, but Vulkan seems to help, double alt-enter helped, turning down shadows helped. Now I usually have 60 fps, which is my vsync limit.

Originally posted by Kalysm:

How are so many people having trouble playing this game? I have a mid to low end graphics card and an aging computer overall and I play it just fine.

I can think of a couple reasons. The game's not finished yet so not fully optimized for every system setup under the sun. Some people can run it with no problems, some can't.

Some people THINK they have a good system but they actually don't. I've been involved in some troubleshooting for several players and in a few cases once they gave their full system specs it turned out they were trying to play with a very low end graphics card that wasn't even close to the minimum listed cards.

Some people complain about the game's performance without searching the forums, without using the numerous performance tweaks that exist, and without really giving any of the helpful geeks and nerds anything to work with other than "It should work.. why doesn't it work?!?!?"