Quick and dirty guide to fix startup issues with Bioshock 2 Remastered when using integrated Intel HD Graphics.

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After many a search with most of the "helpful" forum posts regarding game crashes on integrated Intel HD Graphics being something along the lines of "integrated graphics? No way.. Buy dedicated graphics blah blah" I finally found the solution while simply searching "Intel" in the Steam Bioshock 2 Remastered Community Guides.



Despite the guide being in Russian (I think..) the guide's creator did publish some screenshots which led to the solution.

To avoid copyright infringement I made new screenshots..

The problem seems to be that the default configuration of the game has 2 threads for Havok Physics enabled and multi-threaded rendering disabled leading to the crash.

Open up explorer and go to C:\Users\*YOURNAME*\AppData\Roaming\BioshockHD\Bioshock2
(replace *YOURNAME* with... well.. your name...) and edit the file: 'Bioshock2SP'

Then do a CTRL+F and search for Havok and change the number of threads to one like so:



Then do a CTRL+F and search for 'usemultithreaded' and change to true like so:


After that the game should stop crashing and it should be playable.

Side note: I think on this hardware that the original Bioshock 2 actually looks better than the Remastered version, but in order to get the Steam achievements etc you'll have to play the Remastered edition too...

Hope it works for you :)