“Helldivers 2 Unveils a Surprising PS5 Pro Enhancement”
By An enormous enhancement to clarity – along with performance upgrades too.
Helldivers 2 exhibits significant improvement on PS5 Pro in performance mode compared to its original PS5 version, showcasing a range of visual enhancements. The Pro maintains greater consistency, doing a better job of rendering smooth details. There are fewer visual distractions, and the overall image appears more cohesive during motion. Additionally, there’s a noticeable increase in detail clarity. Text appears sharper, edges are well-defined, and textures reflect finer patterns. While I wouldn’t claim it’s a monumental upgrade, side-by-side comparisons clearly show the Pro console has an advantage.
In terms of rendering, the differences are straightforward. Through my pixel measurements, the PS5 version registers at 1080p, while the Pro receives an enhancement to 1440p, representing a technical boost of 78 percent in pixel count. I did not observe any signs of dynamic resolution in my testing, suggesting both consoles operate with fixed pixel counts. Importantly, this is not combined with temporal upsampling to produce a higher effective resolution. Instead, a somewhat average TAA seems to be in use, offering edge smoothing at the expense of some instability during still frames.
Numerous games this generation render at similar – or lower – pixel counts, yet achieve significantly better final image quality due to the application of reconstruction-based upsampling techniques like TSR or FSR 2. Arrowhead has opted for a straightforward spatial upscale instead, resulting in mixed outcomes. Nonetheless, I believe the PS5 Pro performance mode crosses an image quality threshold where I generally feel satisfied with how it appears on a 4K display.
The standard mode is less captivating. Here, the visual upgrades are relatively minor – not really amounting to much overall, although fine details stand out more clearly and foliage appears more attractive. The rendering setup again feels familiar. The PS5 operates around 1728p, though with a certain sharpness and edge smoothing that suggests the use of FSR 1 for upscaling. The PS5 Pro takes a brute-force approach instead, delivering a full native 4K image. It’s not without its issues as the Pro can still struggle with depth of field, and it doesn’t always produce a perfectly stable rendition of all geometry – however, it does hold an advantage over the standard PS5. Once again, to achieve better results we may need to see some adjustment in Helldivers 2’s anti-aliasing strategy. In terms of performance? Even on the PS5 Pro, the same frame pacing issues we observed at launch remain present.
Thus, there is compelling visual evidence that Helldivers 2 has indeed received a Pro upgrade – despite the lack of public acknowledgment and no Pro Enhanced label on the PlayStation Store. However, one of the DF audience members alerted me that an Arrowhead employee mentioned in a Discord chat that the game had in fact been enhanced for Pro. It’s a common approach to either hint at or refrain from disclosing when a title has received a Pro upgrade, but we can confirm that there is a noticeable visual difference.
Helldivers 2 also offers various image quality adjustments. The anti-aliasing toggle, which was initially broken, now operates effectively, so if you prefer a performance without any AA aesthetic, Arrowhead has got you covered. TAA is quite essential to the game’s presentation, which I think is evident when observing the screen-space reflections, just as one example, so I wouldn’t recommend turning it off. However, TAA significantly softens the visuals.
Arrowhead also provides a slider to adjust post-process sharpening to your preference. The performance mode appears soft with no sharpening, while it looks relatively crisp with maximum sharpening at the cost of increased edge artifacts. The variation in quality mode is subtler, but sharpening plays a role there too. 0.75 is the default in both modes, which I think is sufficient. Even at the maximum setting, it doesn’t deliver that ‘crunchy’ look with ultra-defined edges, so any adjustments here I think are fairly justifiable.
Regarding performance, when we evaluated Helldivers 2 last year, we found the frame rates were generally solid on PS5 in its performance mode, with drops in certain busier sequences. However, that didn’t provide a complete picture, since we only had time to explore the game’s more moderate, less challenging difficulties. Fortunately, a close friend of mine happens to be an expert Helldivers 2 player, so I asked him to guide me through one of the most difficult missions in the game on its highest ‘Big Helldive’ difficulty setting, which promises the most intense and challenging swarms of enemies.
Unsurprisingly, the frame rates are indeed lower than what we documented last year. On the PS5 in performance mode, most of my gameplay in Big Helldive missions fell below 60fps, often lingering in the 50s and 40s. Occasionally, I would even register prolonged stretches in the 30s, with the game clearly struggling to keep up. The beginning of any match generally runs smoothly, but gameplay becomes problematic later when faced with many enemies, leading to consistent frame drops. Lower difficulties present fewer challenges, but players made of sterner stuff will find the higher difficulty levels quite taxing on a standard PS5.
The PS5 Pro shares some similarities. Helldivers 2 does tend to spend significant time within the 40s and 50s during more challenging late-game scenarios, but overall, it does not seem to dip quite as drastically in its most demanding moments – I didn’t experience prolonged gameplay in the 30s, for instance, even while playing quite aggressively. I did