Helldivers 2 begins the long march back into the community's good books with a technical patch that represents the 'opening salvo' in a battle for better performance
Overview & Key Takeaways
Upscaling support, advanced visual optimisation, and more on the way.
Helldivers 2 is currently in the "it's so over" phase of its live-service cycle. A dodgy Warbond plus a general comedown from its Siege of Cyberstan event has left the community discontented and recent Steam reviews at 'Mostly Negative'. After addressing the community on the issue, Arrowhead has begun the process of clawing its way to "we're so back", announcing the first of what appear to be several planned patches focussing on improving performance.
This Wednesday, Arrowhead will deploy a "new set of technical improvements", heading to all platforms in collaboration with port-specialists Nixxes software. This initial patch focusses on three specific areas of optimisation: introducing better upscaling support, adding advanced visual optimisations, and reducing latency.
The specifics of these updates are slightly different across all platforms, but for PC, it breaks down as follows. On the upscaling side, PC players will enjoy high-end FSR 4.0.3 if you have a GPU that supports it, plus support for regular FRS 3.1.5, DLSS 4.5, and XeSS 3.0.
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As for those advanced visualisation options, Helldivers 2 will support variable rate shading after the patch, which dynamically adjusts shading rates in select parts of the image to decrease GPU load. On top of this, Arrowhead has also integrated dynamic resolution scaling, allowing it to adjust on the fly should your screen become filled with bugs, bots, or illuminate. Finally, there's added support for latency-reduction tech like Nvidia Reflex and AMD Anti-Lag 2.
Helldivers 2 - Official 'Attack on Cyberstan' Deep Dive Trailer - YouTube
All of this is arriving on May 27. But Arrowhead stresses that there are more optimisations to come. "This is just the opening salvo in an ongoing campaign to improve performance across the fleet," the developer explains. "We’re also preparing a dedicated tech-focused update later this summer to push these improvements even further."
Technical improvements aren't the only thing Arrowhead has committed to adding to Helldivers 2 either. Its address to the community included promises for additions like longer in-game events, new vehicles, new red stratagems (i.e. the cool ones that rain down hell from the sky) and more. Whether or not you think Helldivers 2 is bad now (and to be honest, I don’t think it is as bad as some players claim—Steam's consensus on the game remains Very Positive overall), Arrowhead has demonstrated an ability to fix what's broken, even if it then breaks it again from time to time.
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