The Best Helldivers 2 Settings Guide

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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...
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Channel: Willy
Views: 72,958
Rating: undefined out of 5
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Length: 11min 26sec (686 seconds)
Published: Sun Mar 31 2024
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