Helldivers 2 marks the latest addition to Sony's lineup of games published for PC and unlike other exclusives, this title
has launched on PC and PS5 simultaneously. which is a logical move for an online extraction shooter and live-service game like this. and Despite lacking advanced rendering technologies such as Ray Tracing and Path Tracing. Helldivers 2 manages to impress visually,
particularly in outdoor scenarios when engaging in shooting bugs and bots. the volumetric fog and lighting which interact and change color depending on the surrounding area
combined with the blood , chunks and particles emanating from shot enemies, contributes
to an atmospheric and stunning visuals.
but not everything is perfect, there are some
drawbacks like the lighting which looks flat particularly when indoor or in shadowed areas and the image quality needs more options to say the least but we will discuss all this in this video and we will also take an in depth look
at each and every graphics setting, to examine it's performance and visual impact. so without any further ado, let's dive in. As usual, let's kickoff with The Image Quality. now unlike most modern games, Helldivers 2 for some reason doesn't feature any temporal upscaler. which means there is no DLSS, FSR2 or XeSS instead the game relies on a basic spatial upscaler which doesn't look great even with quality mode at 1440p, ultra quality can look fine and give a substantial performance gain but it leads to a slightly blurrier image
and what makes things even worse is that the game's native TAA looks shimmery and unstable and there are additional options for supersampling which essentially function as an SSAA option, that renders the game at a higher resolution and then downsamples it to match the native display resolution. but this method is computationally intensive and leads to a massive performance drop. and doesn't really eliminate all
jugged edges and aliasing. and here in Helldivers 2, regular
supersampling appears to render the game at around 150% of the native resolution and Ultra Supersampling takes it to around 200%. and I can say this because if we compare native 4K with Supersampled 1440p and Ultra Supersampled 1080p. we can see almost the same performance, because all these options should be running at native 4K. so overall, Image Quality is not great here and Arrowhead Game Studios should really consider adding some form of temporal upscaling, because If implemented effectively, it would not only result in much better image quality compared to the game's poor TAA but also significantly improve performance in this GPU-intensive game. Let's move to some Post Processing effects starting with Motion Blur and here comparing 0, 50 and 100 shows little performance difference around 3% when going from 0 to 100 Next we have Depth Of Field and turning on this effect at this scene here shows negligible performance impact. and lastly we have Bloom, which also
doesn't have any performance impact. And with that out of the way, let's move on to Textures and here Helldivers 2 is similar
to many other DX12 games. The Textures setting only affect some surfaces
like here and as long as you have enough VRAM, the game will transition to the
highest quality textures for most surfaces regardless of the chosen quality option. and speaking of VRAM, I haven't encounter any issues with 8GB at native 1440p and here at this scene we can see small difference in the allocated and used VRAM when moving between the options Next we have Object Detail Quality, this one adjusts the geometric quality
and level of detail in certain objects. like here for example we can see
that pushing the setting higher improves the mesh quality of some objects. additionally when comparing Low and Medium, we can see that Low exhibits more LOD pop-in that occurs close to the camera and performance wise going from Low to even High
in most scenes shows small impact around 3%. so here I recommend leaving this one at High.
Next we have Render Distance, this one controls the draw distance of far objects. like here we can see that the lowest option get rid of most objects and details
at a distance compared to the other options and performance wise even when CPU bound like here, going from Low to Ultra costs around 2 to 3% so similar to the previous setting, I recommend leaving this one at Ultra Moving on to Shadows, and this one as expected controls the resolution
and quality of shadow maps. and we can see here that only the medium option and above exhibit well defined and higher quality shadows and performance wise going from Lowest and Low to Medium costs around 4%, to High 7% and to Ultra 14% so here I recommend sticking with the Medium shadows and if you can spare some extra performance and you want to improve the resolution of shadows go for High. Next we have Particle Quality, this
one adjusts the quality of anything related to visual effects and particles
like here for example we can see that the close fire effect looks low res and blocky with the lowest options, and same goes for the fire and smoke effect at the background
and here is another example from the ship we can see the same thing with these particles emitting from this projector and in both of these examples, there
is negligible performance impact when going from the lowest to the high option
but this is not the full story and in the next example I'll just show a screenshot of the comparison, because these two turret guns will be shooting and causing intense flashing light that will not be enjoyable to watch. and here we can see that going from Lowest to Low and Medium costs around 4% and to High around 21%. so for this one I recommend sticking with Low or Medium Particle quality to keep the performance stable during intense combat scenarios. Moving on to Reflection Quality, here we can see that the Lowest Option disables all reflections and going to Low and Medium
adds cubmap reflections and the High option enables screen space reflections and the quality of these screen space reflections is not great and they have a lot of occlusion issues. and performance wise going from lowest to Low costs around 2% to Medium 3% and to High 9%. so here I recommend Low or Medium to keep the cubmap reflections enabled, and avoid High because the quality of SSR in this game doesn't justify the extra performance impact. Next we have Space Quality, this
setting affect the quality of some details in the sky during some missions.
like here we can see that this blue star or planet looks blucky with the
low option compared to High and performance wise when looking at the sky we can see around 7% between Low and High. and here in this example when not looking directly at the sky we can see around 2% difference. so Here, I recommend leaving this one at Low and save the extra performance, because the visual impact of this setting is not that noticeable during typical gameplay. For Ambient Occlusion, the game seems to rely on Screen Space Ambient Occlusion or SSAO.. and it's quit effective as you can see here. and enabling Ambient Occlusion doesn't have any significant performance impact so keep it enabled. Moving on to Screen Space Global Illumination,
this setting when enable can introduce approximate bounced lighting using screen space information
which can help enhance the look of the indirect lighting but because of it's screen space nature the visual difference of this setting is so subtle and hard to notice. and performance wise enabling SSGI costs around 4%. so here I recommend leaving this one OFF as the visual impact is unlikely to be noticeable during typical gameplay. Next we have Vegetation and Rubble Density, this one adjusts the density of rendered objects that are scattered on the ground such as rocks, grass,ect. and because of this using the low option as you can see here leads to a lot of Pop-in. and similar thing with Medium. and performance wise in a scene like this which represent the worst case scenario going from Low to Med costs around
2% to High 8% and to Ultra 11%. but in other scenes like this the performance gap between the options is much smaller. so here I recommend leaving this one at High.
Moving on to Terrain Quality, this one is straightforward as it adjust the quality of the terrain. like here for example we can see more of the sand as we push this setting higher and it can also affect the geometric detail of the terrain, like here like here where we can see that higher options improve the level of bumpiness and performance wise we can see around 4% when moving from Low to High so here I recommend Medium or High terrain quality. Next we have Volumetric Fog Quality, this one adjusts the resolution of volumetric lighting and as I mentioned at the beginning of the video, the game relies heavily on volumetric fog and lighting for it's visual presentation. and as we can see here even the low option doesn't compromise the quality of these volumetric effects while the high option makes the light shafts more defined. and performance wise going from Lowest to Low costs around 2%, to Medium 8% and to High 12%. so here I recommend keeping
volumetric fog at Low. Moving on to another volumetric
setting with Volumetric Cloud Quality
this one is similar to the
previous setting but for Clouds and performance wise going from Lowest to Low and Medium costs around 7% and to High 12%. so this is another setting that you
won't notice during typical gameplay, That's why I recommend saving the
performance and keep it at the lowest. Next we have Lighting Quality, this one determines how far some local lights can reach. which affect the lighting in
certain areas like here for example. and performance wise going from Low to Medium costs around 4% and to High around 6%. so here I recommend Med or High.
And lastly we have Anti Aliasing this one controls the game's TAA and gives the ability to turn it off completely if you wish to do so. which is a nice setting for those
who dislike AA or particularly TAA. and here turning on Anti
Aliasing costs around 4% and as this setting is purely down to personal preference, I don't have a specific recommendations here. And with all that being said, these are my recommended settings for Helldivers 2. Let's now compare the performance between Optimized Settings and Ultra Preset in different planets and scenarios. let's star here at the Mantes system which is one of the most demanding areas in the game and here during combat we can see that Optimized Settings improve performance by around 40%. here in Erata when walking around we can see that Optimized Settings on average run around 30% better compared to Ultra Preset
and finally here in Turing when walking we can see around 34% difference between Optimized Settings and Ultra Preset. And with that we reach the end of this video, Thank you so much for watching and for your time if you enjoyed the video leave
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