By Helldivers 2 players have voiced concerns over stuttering and frame drops for months, and studio Arrowhead is still chipping away at those troubles. Some hold out hope that tricks like DLSS or FSR could lift frame rates, but the team warns that several bigger bottlenecks take priority.
“We bring it up regularly,” Arrowhead CEO Shams Jorjani notes regarding DLSS and FSR in a reply on Discord. “It’s on the wishlist, yet there are deeper, more-rooted culprits hurting performance that we’ll tackle ahead of DLSS or FSR, though the topic stays alive in our meetings.”
DLSS and FSR are image-upscaling solutions that let a title render at a lower native res before being reconstructed to your chosen output resolution. In perfect cases, that equates to getting the speed of running at, say, 1080p while enjoying a 4K sheen—at least in principle. Peruse our deeper dive into AI-driven upscaling explained if you’d like a fuller breakdown.
Former Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt—now CCO and creative lead on Helldivers 2—remarked on X (formerly Twitter) shortly after release that DLSS is “neat tech, but hardly vital,” adding he’d rather channel effort into gameplay elements than into boutique rendering features many players might ignore. He swiftly clarified, however, that this didn’t rule out DLSS ever making the roadmap.
Since then, performance hiccups have snowballed, exacerbated by a March patch that “expanded compute load for AI routines.” To an armchair engineer, this sounds less like a GPU-limited scenario and more of a CPU strain, which DLSS alone wouldn’t alleviate. Yet when chasing every last frame, any help matters.
Sharpen your loadout with our Helldivers 2 weapons tier list to serve democracy at peak efficiency.