Helldivers 2 - PlayStation 5/PC - The Digital Foundry Tech Review

hell divers 2 is one of the most refreshing and straightforward multiplayer games I've played in a while it's a third-person bug shooting Blitz GRE offering simple sets of objectives and a broad Armament to help satisfy them the actual action of defeating the game's foes is a lot of fun with hordes of enemies to shoot into Gibbs with a four-person player Squad but does all that multiplayer chaos come with strings attached few games try to achieve destruction at this scale especially factoring in the unpredictability of multiplayer gameplay so what kind of visuals and performance should we expect in the game's console outing on PS5 and can we scale it further on PC systems hell divers 2 has some very compelling environments here we see a pretty typical mix of modern graphical Staples but they are deployed very effectively volumetric lighting is heavily used for instance with shafts of light shooting through rocks and trees the quality here is pretty high and they present without obvious aliasing even on the PS5 in its performance mode as we're seeing here the clouds are also volumetric in nature at least at lower levels of the atmosphere and resolve without distracting artifacting low-lying fog also appears to be part of the equation look at the ground level fog in these scenes which gives some of the planets a certain ethereal quality environmental density tends to be pretty impressive there's a lot of scattered rocks shrubs and toughs of grass throughout the various planets given the size and scope of the game I have to imagine that procedural systems have been extensively used here but the final results look quite natural foliage in particular can be generously placed with some especially verdant Garden worlds I did however note animation issues with the foliage on at least one planet as The Greenery doesn't move smoothly here overall though the lighting and assets come together to make each World feel distinct and give each environment some nice Vistas those small details contrast against the environment especially nicely because of the game's use of relatively high resolution Shadow Maps initially I suspected that some screen space technique might be in use here but slow pans of the camera don't reveal any occlusion issues Instead The Shadow Cascade near the camera seems to be just High resolution enough to capture some of these smaller details without a lot of breakup other elements of the lighting perhaps don't Fair as well the worlds are generally lit convincingly enough but when you get up close you can spot some light leaking places and shadowed regions tend to have a bit of a flat look I suspect that we aren't seeing a lot of baked lighting here or anything like that instead we get the typical mix of ssao and Shadow maps to shade in some of those fer details which works decently well for the big picture stuff but doesn't hold up as well on close examination the reflections also don't offer amazing results we're getting the typical mix of screen space Reflections and Cube Maps here which actually looks pretty decent up close the cube Maps used as a fallback in larger bodies of water and in artificial areas prove a reasonable match for the offscreen detail and the SSR generally looks coherent when geometry includes the SSR though we do see some heavy issues with the reflections with large SSR skirts around the trees here and as a side note we don't actually see any ripples or deformation in the water itself if we walk through it which makes it look overly static after surveying the game's graphical Tech I wasn't quite sure what we were looking at ui4 seemed like an obvious potential choice but it didn't seem well suited for this kind of big multiplayer game with open world environments plus some elements of the postprocessing like the screen space Reflections didn't give very much much of an unreal impression to me after a little bit of research it actually turns out that the game is using a modified version of the discontinued Autodesk Stingray game engine which makes more sense a variant of this engine powered the excellent Warhammer 40K dark tide and while hell divers 2 isn't quite as striking I think the game looks quite strong overall but so far I've just been examining the game in more sedate moments which is perhaps missing the point a bit hell divers 2 is an action-packed title and much of your time will be spent engaging with the game's insect and robotic foes these firefights can look pretty extraordinary especially when all four players are tightly clustered trying to defend an objective key here is how enemies react when shot each bullet strike spawns little bits of blood or smoke alongside chunks of viscera or mechanical bits it makes the simple Act of firing at enemies quite satisfying we can actually Blow Away individual bits off each enemy taking off limbs with small arms fire or obliterating them with artillery I love the physics here especially in aggregate when the frame is just filled with physicalized objects particles and disintegrating enemies buildings can be destroyed in dramatic fashion when hit by air strikes or blown up with a well-placed grenade and the terrain can deform too hell divers 2 is a unique and visually interesting console title but what about image quality and performance here we have two basic visual options a performance and quality mode along with a couple of extra selections to complicate things further the most obvious split between the two modes comes down to resolution here the performance mode runs at 1080p while the quality mode steps up to about 1728 P both modes counted at those figures in every shot I tested so there are no signs of dynamic resolution as far as I can tell in stationary shots the difference between the two is obvious quality mode looks pretty clean and sharp here while the performance mode is very 1080p like with a visibly lower resolution and with a lower res HUD as well on a 4K set the performance mode doesn't look terribly clear while the quality option tends to excel if you zoom in closely in the quality mode you can notice some slightly painterly image characteristics that suggest fsr1 to my or a similar technique notice how Edge detail is subtly rounded here which isn't what we'd expect to see with a simple bilinear upscale beyond the image Clarity differences the quality mode does have noticeably different looking ambient occlusion appearing darker and better defined though I believe this is just a byproduct of the different rendering resolutions on both visual modes we can toggle something labeled anti-aliasing on or off in the game settings even on close examination though I I can't tell what exactly this is supposed to change regardless of the setting we see the same Edge aling and the same image treatment across both performance and quality modes with essentially zero differences and the same TAA in use I'm inclined to say the setting currently doesn't do anything for this video I've kept AA turned off in my footage though it really doesn't seem to matter there's also a setting to adjust the level of image Sharpening at zero sharpening in performance mode Hell divers 2 look soft and indistinct while stepping up to the max sharpening level increases Clarity at the cost of additional artifacting quality mode exhibits the same difference although given its higher resolution the effect is a bit more subtle this is going to be a matter of personal preference although for the purposes of this video I've left it at 75 which is the default hell diver's performance mode does run pretty smoothly here we're mostly at 60fps in typical play with a very smooth readout especially when combined with the game's motion blur hell divers too can suffer from extended dips into the 50s though typically during larger firefights in my gameplay the worst I saw was about 50 FPS so the game does manage to stay pretty close to 60 although it can spend a long time hovering in that region of the frame rate graph if things get heated the quality mode also manages a pretty tight lock on its frame rate target here decreased to 30 FPS but it unfortunately suffers from some obtrusive frame pacing issues with a procession of 16 33 and 50 millisecond frames during typical play there are pockets of clean 33 millisecond frames but there is a fresh batch of poorly paced frames at least every 20 seconds or so with more significant issues seeming to arise when the game is under heavy load there are some genuine frame rate drops in the mix here as well with the game dropping to the high 20s although these aren't very common so that's the PS5 accounted for but what about PC PCS don't have any particularly exciting settings at first glance we're looking at a pretty typical mix of selecta here including texture quality Shadow Quality volumetrics quality and options for SSR and ssgi just going off the presets low settings dramatically Alters the terrain and decimate shadows and should really be avoided if at all possible medium makes the terrain match the Collision greatly improves Shadow res and adds TAA ambient occlusion and additional foliage the high preset adds in a bit of foliage and improves Shadows from there and the ultra preset looks very similar to high but with extra Shadow detail performance-wise we do get a huge FPS boost by sliding down to the low preset though the other presets are pretty similar in performance on my 490 here the various settings options mostly speak for themselves there are two options of note though volumetric fog seems to alter the resolution of the volumetric lighting in general with lower resolution results at lower settings and the anti-aliasing toggle actually does work properly on PC completely turning off any AA treatment it's weird that the setting doesn't do anything on PS5 but at least it functions as described here unfortunately hell divers 2 doesn't make effective use of PC specific rendering Tech so don't expect dlss xss or even FSR 2 here instead the game makes use of a spatial image upscaler that can decrease resolution internally to improve GPU bound performance I can't say what this is for certain but it has all the Hallmarks of FSR 1 just like we saw on PS5 expect very fsr1 like results here then at alter for performance which I counted out at 720p when outputting at 4K the game is an artifact ridden Mass while in the quality mode it looks pretty decent at the lowest end of the render scale we top out at around 180 FPS where the game is CPU limited on my i7 13700 K but we still see sizable performance wins even with the ultra quality setting unfortunately the pretty unexciting visual settings do mean that the upgrades over PS5 aren't as large as you might have expected there's little difference between the PC at Mac settings at 4K and the PS5 in its quality mode absence some slightly higher resolution shadows and a bit of a cleaner image it still doesn't provide a pristine image though and aliasing remains a significant problem we see a solid visual uptick over the ps5s performance mode with a much higher resolution on my PC but that's pretty standard stuff for any PC release on Alex's very high-end system here where Ty typically looking at frame rates in the '90s with settings fully maxed out at 4K resolution that's decent performance but you'd probably want to engage some amount of resolution scaling if playing on a high refresh rate display normally on this system toggling on dlss would be a no-brainer here but of course temporal UPS scalers aren't supported in this game at the moment on a more mid-range PC we can get decent enough performance as long as we're willing to take a settings hit and move down to 1080p resolution here we're typically just above 60 FPS and while this isn't enough to achieve super high frame rates at a decent resolution it's certainly capable of providing a good experience like on a high-end system the frame time readout tends to be very stable here so it should feel smooth unfortunately AMD gpus reportedly lag behind somewhat in this title so users of mid-range AMD Hardware may need to step down a bit in resolution to achieve a good experience when Alex captured this footage he skipped all the various intros and menus and encountered some pretty obvious Shader precompilation when he launched into a gameplay match there's no dedicated UI but the game does feature a relatively brief bit of pre-compilation which does effectively prevent Shader compilation stutter once it has been [Music] completed as a multiplayer experience I think hell divers 2 hits all the right notes the gameplay Basics are super fun and the open open-ended environments give you a fair bit of flexibility to tackle each objective it seems like quite a tactical game too though the need for advanced strategies wasn't too pressing at the lower difficulties that I had the time to unlock it doesn't seem terrifically complicated nor does it come with the kind of comprehensive content package that modern players often expect but at a $40 asking price I think those omissions are more than forgivable the special abilities the game provides combined with Friendly Fire which is enabled at all times is a bit of a recipe for a lot of squad-based fun with friends there are certainly Echoes of other PVE Shooters here namely of the extraction shooter variety but this game seems more oriented around having fun than creating a tightly crafted competitive experience it's still a tense communication-based game but it feels designed to generate memorable gameplay and I think it succeeds both the PS5 and PC versions of Hell divers 2 provide good experience and the game is attractive enough for a large scale multiplayer shooter I would like to see some additional tweakables on PC though temporal up Samplers are a must have in my opinion and frame gen would be great as well the 1080p resolution on PS5 in performance mode is bound to be a source of controversy too but I think it's a sensible trade-off given how taxing this game can be perhaps experimentation with FSR 2 might yield decent results especially considering the unimpressive quality of the existing TAA but this is a tough game to run at high resolutions so hell divers 2 is a compelling multiplayer package and it's technically sound as well players looking for a fresh Co-op experience would be well advised to check it out if you enjoyed this video please like subscribe and press the bell for YouTube notifications check out the patreon at digitalfoundry for exclusive and Early Access content and and to get in touch use social media thanks for watching

Channel: Digital Foundry

Views: 233,638

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Id: fnRrBui6q0E

Length: 15min 35sec (935 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 16 2024