Helldivers 2 players have been complaining about performance issues for the better part of the year, and developer Arrowhead is still working to address those problems. Some fans hope that the implementation of frame rate boosting tech like DLSS or FSR could help, but the devs say there are more important things to fix first.
“We speak about it often,” Arrowhead CEO Shams Jorjani says about DLSS and FSR in response to a question on Discord. “It’s on the wishlist, there are other more fundamental problems that impact performance that we will focus on before DLSS/FSR but it’s being discussed.”
DLSS and FSR are both upscaling technologies that allow the game to render at a low native resolution and have the output upscaled to your preferred level of detail. In ideal circumstances, that means you could get the performance benefits of running a game at, say, 1080p, while enjoying the detail of seeing it in 4K. That’s the basic idea, at least – you can check out our guide to AI upscaling explained if you want a more detailed breakdown of how it works.
Former Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt, now CCO and creative director of Helldivers 2, said on Twitter shortly after the launch of the game that DLSS was “cool tech, but not necessary,” and that he’d prefer to focus on gameplay over implementing technical features that some players may not even use. He quickly noted that did not mean Helldivers 2 would never get DLSS, though.
But frame rates have become a much bigger issue since then, thanks in part to a March update that “increased the number of AI calculations the game can perform.” From a purely layman’s understanding of how this all works, that sounds like the kind of issue DLSS might not be able to address, since it’s more of a CPU than a GPU issue. But in the battle for maximum performance, every frame counts.
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