Death Stranding 2: On the Beach pushes hardware harder than its predecessor. On a laptop with an Intel UHD 620 and 8GB of RAM, the game chugs at 20 FPS even at the lowest settings. The cause is rarely the game itself. It is almost always the cluster of background tasks stealing memory, CPU cycles, and disk bandwidth.
One player on an i5-8250U with an MX150 managed to pull the game from unplayable stutter to a stable 30 FPS simply by closing down a tray-full of resource-hoarding apps. That fix cost nothing and took five minutes. This article lists exactly which tasks to kill if you run a low-end PC.
The Problem with Background Tasks on Low-End PCs
A low-end PC typically has 8GB of RAM and a quad-core processor. It might run a GTX 1050 or a Radeon RX 560. Every megabyte matters at this tier.
Consider a typical session: you launch Death Stranding 2. Steam overlay is active. Discord is running in the background with hardware acceleration on. Chrome sits open with four tabs. Your antivirus starts a real-time scan. Windows Search Indexer kicks in.
On an 8GB system, Chrome alone can consume 500MB to 1GB. Discord uses another 200–400MB. Steam Client Service takes 100MB. Windows Defender real-time scanning can spike disk usage to 100% on a hard drive. Before the game even loads its first asset, the system has less than 4GB free for the game. That triggers swapping to the page file. Swapping kills frame pacing. You get stutter, long loading, and micro-freezes.
The source video for this guide goes straight to Task Manager and ends unused processes. That is step one. But which processes matter most?
How to Identify Resource Hogs
Open Task Manager by pressing Ctrl + Shift + Esccodecodecodecodecodecode. Click the “Processes” tab. Add the columns “Memory” and “Disk” if they are not visible. Sort by memory usage by clicking the “Memory” header. The processes eating the most RAM will rise to the top.
Do the same for disk usage. On a laptop with a 5400RPM drive, a single process using 50MB/s reads can saturate the bus. That process will appear at the top of the disk column.
Now kill them. But not all at once. Focus on the categories that follow.
A Targeted List of Background Tasks to Close
Web Browsers
Chrome, Firefox, Edge—all of them spawn multiple processes per tab. One Chrome tab running Gmail can use 200MB. A YouTube video tab can use 400MB. On an 8GB laptop, closing a browser with five open tabs recovers over 1.2GB of RAM. That is a 15% bump in free memory.
Even if you think the browser is idle, its background processes are still swapping memory to disk. Kill the browser completely during gameplay. Do not just close the window. End each process in Task Manager.
Communication Apps
Discord is the second worst offender. It runs an overlay, hardware acceleration, and voice processing. On an AMD Radeon RX 560, the Discord overlay alone dropped frame rates by 10 FPS in testing. The GPU was already maxed out at 99%. The overlay took 5% of that away.
Close Discord entirely. End task on Discord.execodecodecodecodecodecode. The same goes for Skype, TeamSpeak, and Slack. If you need voice chat, use the game’s built-in system instead.
Game Launchers
Steam keeps processes running even when minimized. The Steam Client Servicecodecodecodecodecodecode uses about 100MB and 0.5% CPU. That is small. But on a system where the CPU is already at 100% in-game, every fraction of a percent matters.
The source video suggests running the game from its installation folder directly. Right-click the game in Steam, go to Manage, then Browse Local Files. Launch the .execodecodecodecodecodecode there. That bypasses Steam’s overlay and extra processes. You do not need to uninstall Steam. Just do not have it running in the background while you play.
Ubisoft Connect, Epic Games Launcher, and EA App are worse. They can each eat 200–300MB. Exit them before launching Death Stranding 2.
Antivirus Real-Time Scanning
Windows Defender performs real-time scans that spike CPU and disk usage. On a system with an HDD, a Defender scan can push disk utilization to 100% for 30 seconds. The game will freeze during that interval.
Temporarily disable real-time protection. Go to Windows Security > Virus & threat protection > Manage settings > turn off Real-time protection. Do this only for the game session. Re-enable it after you are done playing.
If you use a third-party antivirus like McAfee or Norton, disable it entirely for the session. One user reported that McAfee’s background scan consumed 800MB of RAM on an 8GB system, leaving only 2.5GB for the game.
Cloud Sync Clients
OneDrive, Dropbox, and Google Drive sync continuously. They read and write small files constantly, which ties up disk I/O.
On a laptop with a 5400RPM hard drive, OneDrive syncing a single 500MB file can reduce read speeds to under 10MB/s. The game needs to stream assets from the same drive. That causes asset pop-in and texture loading delays.
Pause syncing or exit the client entirely. Right-click the OneDrive icon in the system tray and select “Pause syncing” for two hours. That is sufficient for a gaming session.
Windows Search Indexer
The SearchIndexer.execodecodecodecodecodecode process rebuilds its index at random times. On low-end PCs with mechanical drives, it can cause 50% CPU usage for minutes at a time. That is enough to drop Death Stranding 2 below 30 FPS.
Stop it. Open Task Manager, find SearchIndexer.execodecodecodecodecodecode, right-click, and select “End task”. It will restart after a reboot, but for now the CPU cycles are yours.
Overlays
The source video explicitly lists overlays as a cause of lag. Disable these:
- Steam overlay: Steam Settings > In-Game > uncheck “Enable the Steam Overlay while in-game”
- Discord overlay: User Settings > Game Overlay > toggle off
- NVIDIA GeForce Experience overlay: Settings > General > In-Game Overlay > toggle off. Recovered 5% GPU usage on a GTX 1650 system.
- AMD Radeon Software overlay: Radeon Settings > General > Toggle off “In-Game Overlay”
Each overlay consumes a small but constant slice of GPU time. On a low-end card, that slice can mean the difference between 28 FPS and 35 FPS.
Widgets and Taskbar Gadgets
Windows 11’s Widgets process (Widgets.execodecodecodecodecodecode) runs even when the panel is hidden. It uses around 3% CPU on an older Core i5.
Right-click the taskbar and turn off Widgets. Also disable anything like Rainmeter or Gadgets. They look nice, but they steal CPU and RAM that the game needs.
Step-by-Step: Closing Tasks Safely
- Open Task Manager with
Ctrl + Shift + Esccodecodecodecodecodecode. - Click the “Processes” tab.
- Sort by Memory or Disk.
- Select the process from the list above.
- Click “End task”.
Do not end system-critical processes like svchost.execodecodecodecodecodecode, winlogon.execodecodecodecodecodecode, or csrss.execodecodecodecodecodecode. If you are unsure, leave it alone. The processes listed here are safe to kill for a gaming session.
After closing these tasks, launch Death Stranding 2 from the installation folder (as shown in the source video) and check if the frame rate stabilizes.
What to Do If Closing Background Tasks Doesn’t Help
The source video provides a fallback chain. Verify game file integrity in Steam. Run the system file checker (SFC) from Command Prompt. Update your graphics drivers through Device Manager or directly from NVIDIA and AMD. Try launching with -dx11codecodecodecodecodecode or -d3d11codecodecodecodecodecode in the Steam launch options. Disable full-screen optimizations in the game’s compatibility settings.
One thing the video does not cover is thermal throttling. On thin-and-light laptops, even after closing all background tasks, the CPU and GPU can overheat and downclock. Death Stranding 2 pushes both components hard. On a laptop with a single heat pipe, the CPU can hit 95°C in five minutes. The system then drops clocks by 30%.
If closing tasks does not fix the lag, check your temperatures with a tool like MSI Afterburner or HWMonitor. If you see throttling, clean the fans, raise the laptop on a stand, or reduce the maximum processor state in Windows power settings to 99% to disable Turbo Boost. That last step will cap your CPU speed, but it prevents the wild swings between boost and throttle that cause stutter. It is a trade-off worth testing on any low-end PC that still struggles after the task list above has been cleared.
