A big boost to resolution - and performance improvements too.
Helldivers 2launched last year to great acclaim, with near-constant death-defying thrills and mayhem.
So is this enough to solve the game’s remaining technical concerns?
Or is this a bit of an illusory Pro upgrade?
The Pro delivers more stability, doing a better job of resolving fine detail.
There’s less shimmering visible to the eye and the image generally appears more coherent in motion.
There’s also a perceptible jump in image detail.
Text is clearer, edges are sharper, and textures resolve finer patterns.
Rendering-wise, the differences are fairly uncomplicated.
Critically though, thisisn’tcombined with temporal upsampling to achieve a higher effective final resolution.
Arrowhead is sticking with a simple spatial upscale instead, with results that are somewhat mixed.
The quality mode is less compelling.
The rendering setup is again familiar.
PS5 Pro takes the brute force approach instead, pulling off a full native 4K image.
Even on PS5 Pro, the same frame-pacing issues we saw at launch are present.
Helldivers 2 offers some other image quality tweakables as well.
However, TAA does soften the image substantially.
Arrowhead also provides a slider to dial in post-process sharpening to your taste.
The difference in quality mode is more subtle but sharpening has a definite role to play there too.
0.75 is the default in both modes, which I think is sensible enough.
Unsurprisingly, the frame-rates are indeed worse than what we logged last year.
PS5 Pro has a lot of similarities.
I did notice brief stutters at one point as well across a few hours of capture.
However, my general impression is that the performance level is indeed higher on the Pro machine.
But I consistently found a clear, meaningful frame-rate advantage on Pro in these ultra-demanding missions.
Helldivers 2 is great fun.
Arrowhead has been steadily adding content to the game as well.
It’s been expanded considerably since we first played it.
At the same time the game does have some lingering technical quirks.
It’s also still somewhat unstable.
Helldivers 2 had notorious data pipe connectivity problems at launch and those problems still haven’t been resolved completely.
Even so, Helldivers 2 is a good Pro experience.
It’s not transformatively upgraded, but it does look and run decidedly better than the base machine.
