While the "Destiny 2: Beyond Light" expansion made a very positive impression on us, it also resulted in a performance hit for some players. For example, according to the first post in this Reddit thread, Beyond Light caused players' games to drop from 100-130 fps to 45-55 fps and GPU utilization to exceed 100%. A number of responses claiming similar problems have been received.

Bungie said in November 2020 that it was looking into reports of "issues related to low performance on PC" and launched a mega-thread tracking updates and possible workarounds. Now, with the latest "This Week at Bungie" update, we finally know what the problem was and why Bungie has not been willing to jump in with both feet to fix this issue.

"Performance testing and optimization on PC is very complex due to the different combinations of hardware, software, and in-game settings. With the release of Beyond Light, we made major changes to the engine while working at home," Bungie wrote.

"One of the unfortunate consequences of working at home is that we no longer have access to a PC compatibility lab to do detailed testing of the performance impact of our changes. As a result, the update has regrettably degraded performance on some PC configurations.

Developers have since made fixes with each update, but it has taken time to get things back to normal, as Bungie has had to rely on testing by outside partners and feedback from the main game to determine what impact the changes will have. For this reason, Bungie does not even discuss its work in the patch notes: "It is difficult to predict how much each change will improve performance, so we were reluctant to promise a fix, even though we regularly optimize for performance," Bungie stated.

The good news is that Destiny 2's performance is now "nearly on par with pre-Beyond Light performance on some PC configurations." While this is not the most accurate metric ever, it is at least an improvement. And it's not over yet: Bungie continues to work on the problem and says it is "optimistic about the future."

Bungie is also addressing the issue of enemies "teleporting" more easily since the release of Beyond Light, stating that changes to the server's outgoing bandwidth limits should lessen the impact, although some activity will not be affected .