Helldivers 2 is easily the best objective-based
squad shooter to have come out this decade. Dropping into planets to fight bugs and bots with
powerful weapons and calling down orbital strikes feels incredible. But, the performance and frame
rate have left something to be desired. The reason for this is the game's engine: Autodesk Stingray
was discontinued in November 2018. Almost 6 years ago. So we're not getting many of the improvements
current-gen games ship with to help older systems keep up. After the first major patch gave up
exo-suits on March 8th the in-game performance took a major hit. That being said this game looks
very impressive and Arrowhead Games Studio has really pushed the Stingray engine to its limits
in order to pull this off. So, in this video, I'm going to break down each graphics setting
and give you the most optimized ones so you can stay above 60 FPS without compromising on
visual quality. My rig is a 5600X and RTX 4070 and everything was captured at 1440p. This video
took a huge amount of work, testing every setting, and re-testing on multiple planets, and combat
scenarios, to ensure accurate data. So a LIKE and FOLLOW would be greatly appreciated! If you
want to check specific settings or just want to just see the optimized ones so you can get back
to spreading democracy there will be chapters with time codes in the description. So without further
ado, let's get right into the first setting: Texture Quality. I've seen videos and articles
saying this game defaults to the highest textures, no matter what you choose, and this is FALSE.
As you'll see how blurry it gets on the lowest setting. the performance between these settings is
quite low you'll only gain about 1% going down to medium or low. So, just set this one based on how
much VRAM your GPU has. For Object Detail Quality, this will change how many polygons are used
to make up objects in the world. Dropping down to Medium will reduce the detail in further
objects, such as the rock face in the distance while dropping down to Low will greatly reduce the
polygon count used on ALL objects, near and far, introducing noticeable LOD pop-in with only a
2% performance uplift. For render distance, this will change the quality and quantity of distance
objects such as the rock faces in this example. There's a 1% uplift in performance when dropping
from Ultra to High and no improvement when going lower. With the game's ever-present fog, you'll
be hard-pressed to see much difference between Ultra and High, so I'd say save the performance
and turn it down. For Sadow Quality this affects the resolution and sharpness of shadows. Dropping
from Ultra to High will give us a 2% increase at the cost of making shadows become soft. Going
down to Medium will give us a further 2% at the cost of lower-res shadows, but the difference is
pretty minor so it's worth it. At Low the shadows become sharp again, but at a quite low resolution.
This might be worth it on low-end hardware as it would give you an 8% increase compared to Ultra.
At Lowest, the shadows are barely discernable blobs and there's no performance gain for this
heavy visual hit. For Particle Quality, there's a substantial difference in the enhancement
of the High option vs. lower ones, as you can see more sparks and higher-resolution fire. I
would recommend you keep it on High unless you absolutely have to drop it to keep a stable 60 FPS
during heavy combat. Just don't go down to Lowest as the resolution is very low, and only a small
performance increase. For Reflection Quality, the High setting has screen-space reflection
which can look nice in certain circumstances, however, the occlusion artifacts will end up
ruining the visual presentation. Medium and Low use cube maps that look very similar, and Lowest
is essentially no reflections making water look like a flat texture. With a performance increase
of about 7%, the Low setting is the winner here. Space Quality is actually the most useless
setting in the game. As far as I've found the only thing it affects is this one star in the
sky. You can even see the planet next to it is staying just as clear when going down to Low.
And, with a performance increase of about 6-8% turning this down to Low is a no-brainer. Ambient
Occlusion darkens areas between 2 surfaces that are in close proximity. This adds realism, making
objects seem more grounded, and further darkening shadows depending on the occlusion to the light
source. Turning this off yields a 3.5% uplift BUT at the cost of significantly reduced visual
quality. Screen Space Global Illumination is supposed to upgrade the lighting, where shadows
and ambient occlusion are, by adding light and color that would be bouncing off the environment.
The problem here is the technique used by the Stingray engine is not very precise so it ends up
giving shadows an incorrect glow. So leaving this setting off ends up looking better AND has a
3% performance increase. Vegetation & Rubble Density is self-explanatory. Changing the setting
from Ultra to High will reduce the distance that grass and shrubs are drawn at. Dropping down to
Medium will further cull vegetation and remove some of the nearby rocks. At Low more rocks
will be removed and only sparse vegetation is drawn. Going down each setting level only affects
performance by around 1% in THIS scene. But in a dense forest world like Malevelon Creek, it
can be as high as 4% per step down. For most, I would recommend sticking to High to avoid nearby
pop-in of rocks and vegetation, but going down to Medium could help you reclaim some FPS. On to
Terrain Quality: for the High setting bump-maps are used to add extra depth details to the ground
as you can see here. Turning down to Medium will remove most of this extra depth, but only give you
around 1% higher FPS. Going further down to Low will also reduce the ground texture quality giving
a performance bump of 4% when compared to High. Volumetric Fog quality has more aspects to it
than previously noticed by other reviewers. Most have noticed that for each setting level you
go down light shafts will reduce in complexity; HOWEVER, if you go down to Low or Lowest
certain lights at night will no longer cast against the volumetric fog. With a 6% difference
in performance when going from Medium to Lowest you'll need to make the choice between extra
lighting details, or extra frames. For Volumetric Cloud Quality you will see a 5% uplift in frames
when dropping to the Low setting with almost no difference in the quality of clouds when compared
to High. I wouldn't recommend going further to the Lowest unless you really need the extra 2%, as
the nice volumetric clouds will be replaced by a few basic clouds. For LIghting Quality, this
one is perplexing. I tested 4 different planets during day and night missions and could find
basically no difference between High, Medium, and Low settings. The only place I could find any
REAL difference was on your ship as seen in this screenshot comparison. Maybe it's a bug that
needs fixing in future patches, but for now, at the cost of 3% when on the planet, I see
no reason for us to use anything other than Low. The last setting in the Graphics menu
is Anti-Aliasing. I would highly recommend having Anti-Aliasing On with Sharpening at 100%.
Without it, edges have noticeable stair-stepping and you'll see intrusive shimmering on rocks and
foliage. If, however, you prefer Anti-Aliasing Off, then I would also recommend turning
Sharpening down to 0 to reduce these effects; but, as I said, you really should keep this on if
possible because there's a big visual improvement when using Anti-Aliasing. Now for the biggest
performance increase: Render Scale. Dropping from Native to Ultra Quality will definitely increase
FPS as I saw a 21% increase. Unfortunately, since this game is mostly CPU-bound, I didn't
see any further improvements going down to Quality or Balanced. So, this will be something
you need to test with your own graphics card. I don't recommend going down any further
to Performance unless you're playing this on a handheld like the ROG Ally; but at that
point, you'll most likely have to turn all other settings down to minimum. Don't even
bother with Ultra-Performance as this gives you a smeary mess in motion. I also don't
recommend trying to Super-Sample the game; It looks very crisp but since it's rendering
double the pixels it will cut your frame rate in half. Finally, here's a comparison between
Quality, Ultra Quality, and Native. Zoomed in at 3x scale you can see these 3 are pretty
similar with, of course, Native being the best. So there you have it: These are the best settings
for high performance while still keeping the best visual quality. The settings I will be using are
highlighted in Green and the Red ones you can use if you need to squeeze out more frames to get
a solid 60 FPS. Render Scale will be entirely GPU-dependent; I saw no improvement going
lower than Ultra-Quality with an RTX 4070, but if you have an older card you should
see an improvement dropping down to Quality. Stress-testing the game with the Optimized
settings we're staying above 70 FPS when attacking a large bot [Automaton] outpost on Helldive
difficulty, with a mech [Exosuit], and a sentry, AND 2 orbital strikes, ALL AT ONCE. At lower
difficulty, we're getting mostly 100 FPS with some dips into the 90s when there's a lot of
action on the screen. With that, I'd like to thank you for watching! And don't forget to LIKE
and SUBSCRIBE and I'll see you in the next one...
