Helldivers Received Stealth: Latest Updates and Analysis

Helldivers 2 has received a 'stealth' PS5 Pro upgrade - and here's what it does

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 unveiled 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 superior 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 advanced 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 advanced. 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 advanced 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 expressed 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. [website] 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 superior 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 elements 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 improved than the base machine.

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RTX Mega Geometry in Alan Wake 2 - improved, faster, more efficient ray tracing

It's been over six years since the first consumer-level graphics cards arrived that supported hardware accelerated ray tracing and while hardware has improved massively since the launch of Nvidia's Turing architecture in 2018, this has been matched with innovations in the software space. RTX Mega Geometry was revealed at CES 2025 with a range of compelling demos, but now we have our first example of the technology in a shipping game: Alan Wake 2. There are quality, efficiency and performance upgrades but perhaps the biggest surprise in our testing is that it's the RTX 20-series and 30-series GPUs that benefit most.

Let's start with the basics - what is RTX Mega Geometry? This requires an understanding of how RT actually works. As things stand, every game essentially creates two 3D worlds - the world as you see it in-game and a secondary 'BVH structure' which is typically a lower detail rendition of the environment. BVH stands for bounding volume hierarchy. Rays are projected into the BVH structure and their direction is then calculated. As you might imagine, RT itself is already computationally expensive, so creating and tracing into the BVH structure adds to the cost. Furthermore, there are limitations - while the game world may be animated, it does not mean the BVH will be, potentially leading to mismatches and loss of visual quality.

Enter RTX Mega Geometry, which is basically a new API allowing for a new type and hierarchy to the BVH structure, containing the game world's geometry and assets. The focus is on animated geometry, support for a larger amount of level-of-detail transitions and adaptive tesselation where the amount of actual geometry per frame is constantly changing. Mega Geometry adds a new level to the BVH structure: the CLAS or Cluster Acceleration Structure. While the extra complexity adds to the time to trace rays, there's an extraordinary increase in detail and support for animated environments.

RTX Mega Geometry is essentially an Nvidia-branded version of a fundamental change to RT APIs that will almost certainly be adopted by all vendors. In a world where mesh shading, Epic's Nanite and the basic requirement for animated environments come to the fore, the existing DXR APIs aren't really fit for purpose - all of which brings us to the specific implementation found in Remedy's Alan Wake 2.

This title is an excellent use-case for RTX Mega Geometry as the game world is rich in detail via mesh shading and is highly animated. In Alan Wake 2, geometry is actually physically moving and transforming like a skinned character mesh, as opposed to 'faking' it with a vertex shader. All of which makes the implementation difficult with an existing BVH structure. A number of optimisations are in place to increase performance - such as decreasing the animation rate the further detail is from the player. The first 10 metres are full rate, followed by half, third and quarter rate further into the distance. On PS5, this is halved further. The closest detail runs at half rate, and only characters run at full rate.

RTX Mega Geometry has clear and measurable improvement. Like for like, VRAM usage was reduced by around 300MB in my testing. In practical terms, the RTX 4060 now runs 42 percent faster using direct lighting and low quality indirect lighting as it's no longer running out of VRAM. Meanwhile, CPU performance improves too. On a lowly Ryzen 5 3600, I saw a 14 percent improvement to frame-rate in the custom bench sequence we built for our GPU reviews.

For GPU performance, I benched with FSR upscaling and low path tracing with direct lighting, finding that the RTX 2080 Ti at native 1080p has a 13 percent improvement to performance. Outside of the benchmark scene and in actual gameplay at 1080p using DLSS quality mode, running through the first brings performance in the mid 20fps region up to 30fps. Moving on to the RTX 3080, performance improves by 10 percent. At 1080p DLSS quality mode, frame-rate is now north of 40fps and no longer dips beneath. Intriguingly, however, I noted no real performance gains whatsoever in the same tests running on RTX 4090 and RTX 5080. However, you do get all the quality gains I talked about previously.

Beyond RTX Mega Geometry, the new version of Alan Wake 2 also ships with a new ultra ray tracing mode, but before I go on, I should stress that I still recommend optimised settings for those looking to experience RT in the game - so that's low RT with direct lighting enabled. This delivers the biggest bang for the buck, with anything further more in the realm of diminishing returns.

Ultra RT is a nice addition to the settings though, adding extra fidelity that essentially adds final flourishes to the RT feature set. That starts with improvements to transparency ray tracing, allowing for more accuracy in the effect with multiple bounces. Secondly, indirect lighting is enhanced, resulting in improved shading and more accurate bounce lighting. All told, both new aspects offer relatively conservative improvements but looking forward to an era where PCs can run this game with ease, it's nice to see 'luxury' aspects that scale into the capabilities of the hardware of tomorrow.

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Wreckfest 2 is ramming through the barricades of early access next month and I will be waiting there patiently to get run over

Hoo-eee! The sequel to the rootinest-tootinest gassiest-guzzlingiest racecar rasslin' game is launching into early access in March this year. Wreckfest 2 is the follow-up to smashing racer Wreckfest, which came out in 2018 but which I only discovered last year while listing our best racing games. My friends, it got on the list. Developers Bugbear say they have "overhauled its physics engine to deliver the most intense crashes, deeper component damage, and absolute vehicular mayhem." We can see a little bit of that in a new trailer below, which also gives us an exact early access release date.

March 20th? That's soon! Immature drivers? That's me! At launch the game will have its usual multiplayer racing (my favourite), single player racetrack ruckusing, demolition derby modes, and car customisation. We aren't told how limited the pool of cars will be at launch but the devs say "new cars and other vehicles will be added as the game evolves".

They plan to add other cogs and bonnets as the early access trundles along, including: tournaments, a career mode, a skill-based matchmaking system, more car customising options, challenges (funny smash-ups like the first game's chaotic "lawnmower fights") and server queues. This last one being a basic online comfort the original sadly lacked. The one feature I would like to see is the ability to customise and tweak your car while spectating the final laps of a race after you've been knocked out. In the first Wreckfest, you have to quit the race to do that. A boy can dream!

I'm jazzed, even if it does look like the early access will be lighter on fun stuff than the previous game currently is. As I stated in my Space Engineers 2 review, early access sequels can be a hard sell when the previous game already does so much. in recent times the developers had to remove some of the game's aspects from its Steam page, because those aspects wouldn't actually be present in the early access version, and will come later. "Long awaited aspects like mod support or additional languages will come throughout the Early Access progress," they stated, "or with the [website] full launch at the latest."

I'll slam the brakes on my judgements until I play, but know that I can forgive a lot if the cars feel good to swivel and smoosh satisfyingly into my enemies. I am the literal definition of their immature driver. After decades of casually enjoying the motoring machines of Burnout Paradise or the upside-down antics of Grip, I finally learned how to drive in real life only last year. It is both less fun and far scarier than video games have led me to believe. But Wreckfest weirdly helped with that.

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