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 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 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.