Helldivers 2 launched last year to great acclaim, with near-constant death-defying thrills and mayhem. But its PS5 version wasn’t perfect, with somewhat compromised image quality when targeting 60fps – and performance issues to boot. Enter PS5 Pro. While developer Arrowhead Game Studios hasn’t announced a PS5 Pro enhancement, there’s evidence the multiplayer shooter has indeed seen a substantial PS5 Pro bump. So is this enough to solve the game’s remaining technical concerns? Or is this a bit of an illusory Pro upgrade?
Helldivers 2 looks significantly improved on PS5 Pro in performance mode when compared against its PS5 counterpart, with a number of image quality improvements. The Pro delivers more stability, doing a better job of resolving fine detail. There’s less shimmering visible to the eye and the image generally appears more coherent in motion. There’s also a perceptible jump in image detail. Text is clearer, edges are sharper, and textures resolve finer patterns. I wouldn’t say it’s a huge improvement, but side-by-sides reveal a clear edge for the Pro console.
Rendering-wise, the differences are fairly uncomplicated. In my pixel counts, the PS5 version comes in at 1080p, while the Pro gets an upgrade to 1440p, which is technically 78 percent more pixels. I couldn’t find any signs of dynamic resolution in my testing, suggesting both consoles run with locked pixel counts. Critically though, this isn’t combined with temporal upsampling to achieve a higher effective final resolution. Instead, a pretty mediocre TAA seems to be in use, providing edge treatment at the cost of some instability at rest.
A lot of games this generation render at comparable – or lower – pixel counts, but end up with much better final image quality than this due to the use of reconstruction-based upsampling solutions like TSR or FSR 2. Arrowhead is sticking with a simple spatial upscale instead, with results that are somewhat mixed. Still, I think the PS5 Pro performance mode crosses an image quality threshold where I’m generally fine with the way it looks on a 4K set.
The quality mode is less compelling. Here, the image improvement is relatively slight – not really amounting to much generally speaking, though fine detail resolves more clearly and foliage generally looks better. The rendering setup is again familiar. PS5 clocks in at around 1728p, though with a characteristic sharpness and edge smoothing that makes me think it’s using FSR 1 as an upscaling solution. PS5 Pro takes the brute force approach instead, pulling off a full native 4K image. It’s not a perfect solution as the Pro can still struggle with depth of field, and doesn’t deliver a perfectly stable rendition of all geometry – but it does have an edge over the base machine. Again, to see better results still we’d have to see some revision of Helldivers 2’s anti-aliasing technique. Performance? Even on PS5 Pro, the same frame-pacing issues we saw at launch are present.
So, there is strong visual evidence that Helldivers 2 has received a Pro upgrade – despite no public confirmation of one and no Pro Enhanced label on the PlayStation Store. However, one of the DF audience tipped me off that an Arrowhead employee said in a Discord chat that the game had indeed been upgraded for Pro. It’s a strange way to announce – or not really announce – that a game has received a Pro upgrade, but we can confirm that there is a clear visual difference.
Helldivers 2 offers some other image quality tweakables as well. The anti-aliasing toggle, which was broken at launch, actually works now, so if you’d prefer that pin-sharp no AA look, Arrowhead has you covered. TAA is pretty integral to the game’s presentation, which I think is evident when you look at the screen-space reflections, just as one example, so I wouldn’t recommend dropping it. However, TAA does soften the image substantially.
Arrowhead also provides a slider to dial in post-process sharpening to your taste. The performance mode looks soft with zero sharpening and reasonably clear with max sharpening at the cost of additional edge artifacts. The difference in quality mode is more subtle but sharpening has a definite role to play there too. 0.75 is the default in both modes, which I think is sensible enough. Even the maximum value doesn’t really have that ‘crunchy’ look with ultra-defined edges, so any value here I think is pretty defensible.
Performance-wise, when we looked at Helldivers 2 last year, we found that frame-rates were generally reasonable on PS5 in its performance mode, with dips in certain busier sequences. However, that wasn’t really spelling out the full picture, because we only had time to unlock and play through the game’s more moderate, less hectic difficulties. Fortunately though, a close friend of mine is also a world-class Helldivers 2 player, so I asked him to carry me through some of the toughest missions around on the game’s maximum ‘Super Helldive’ difficulty setting, which promises the largest, most aggressive swarms of foes.
Unsurprisingly, the frame-rates are indeed worse than what we logged last year. On PS5 in performance mode, most of my gameplay in Super Helldive missions is sub-60fps, with long stretches in the 50s and 40s. Sometimes, I’d even clock an extended run in the 30s, with the game clearly struggling to keep pace. The outset of any given match usually runs fine, but more enemy-heavy gameplay later on tends to suffer, with constant frame-rate drops. Lower difficulties present less of a concern, but players who are made of sterner stuff will find the higher challenge levels quite taxing on a base PS5.
PS5 Pro has a lot of similarities. Helldivers 2 does like to spend a good amount of time in the 40s and 50s here in more challenging endgame content but generally speaking, it doesn’t seem to dip quite as hard in its worst moments – I didn’t spot extended gameplay in the 30s, for instance, despite playing quite aggressively. I did notice brief stutters at one point as well across a few hours of capture. Of course, it’s virtually impossible to match content across my capture sessions, given the hectic multiplayer-oriented nature of Helldivers 2. However, my general impression is that the performance level is indeed higher on the Pro machine. It does a better job of sticking within a reasonable frame-rate window and is more often compatible with the PS5 Pro’s VRR range. The game doesn’t support 120Hz output on PS5 or Pro, so you’re limited to 48fps and above to get VRR smoothness.
It’s a curious situation, given that the Pro’s resolution bump should theoretically eat up most if not all of the console’s extra GPU capability, and it only has a mild CPU clock increase. But I consistently found a clear, meaningful frame-rate advantage on Pro in these ultra-demanding missions.
Helldivers 2 is great fun. No other player versus environment multiplayer game captures the same sense of chaos, the same wild improvisation of explosions and retreats. With a squad firing on all cylinders – or indeed, just one very skilled teammate – you can perform some incredible death-defying feats. Arrowhead has been steadily adding content to the game as well. Updates have brought player-controllable vehicles into the game, along with a new enemy faction, melee weapons, and a ton of guns and vanity skins. It’s been expanded considerably since we first played it.
At the same time the game does have some lingering technical quirks. It lacks modern upscaling technologies like DLSS and FSR, frame generation, more advanced rendering features like ray tracing, and has some performance issues. It’s also still somewhat unstable. Over a few hours of testing, we encountered a couple of dropped games and even experienced a disconnection issue at one point, requiring a game restart. Helldivers 2 had notorious network connectivity problems at launch and those problems still haven’t been resolved completely.
We’d like to see further improvements then and it might be nice to see the adoption of FSR 2 or PSSR for the console versions of Helldivers 2, just to get image quality to a really good place for 60fps play. That’s assuming it would be manageable given the team’s technical expertise and the deprecated state of the game engine. The PS5 Pro at least offers enough raw pixels to look decent enough, if not quite meeting the 4K60 standard many Pro titles aim for. Even so, Helldivers 2 is a good Pro experience. It’s not transformatively upgraded, but it does look and run decidedly better than the base machine.
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