Helldivers 2 — best graphics settings (2026)

Typical impact 0-5% · 4% fps cost

In Helldivers 2, we recommend Texture Quality at High (4% fps cost).

Controls the maximum mipmap resolution loaded for surface textures. Higher levels stream larger texture maps (2K/4K) from disk into VRAM via the texture streaming pool. The GPU samples these during fragment shading using the currently bound sampler state. The FPS cost is minimal when VRAM is sufficient because texture fetch latency is hidden by the cache hierarchy, but exceeding VRAM capacity triggers page-faulting and hitching as textures are swapped between system RAM and VRAM.

In Helldivers 2: Decima streams texture data into a dedicated VRAM pool using its own asset streaming system rather than the OS virtual texture layer. At Ultra, 4K surface textures are loaded for terrain, structures, and character armor, which is comfortable on 6 GB+ but can cause streaming hitches on 4 GB cards at 1440p or above. High is the practical sweet spot — visually near-identical to Ultra but well within the 4–6 GB budget. FPS impact is negligible unless VRAM is exceeded.

Typical impact 8-25% · 12% fps cost

In Helldivers 2, we recommend Shadow Quality at High (12% fps cost).

Controls shadow map resolution, filtering method, and cascade count for dynamic shadows. The engine renders the scene from each light source perspective into depth-only shadow map textures. Higher settings increase shadow map resolution (1024 to 4096 texels), add more cascaded shadow map splits for the directional light (improving near-field resolution), and enable softer PCF or PCSS filtering which requires more depth comparison samples per pixel during the lighting pass.

In Helldivers 2: Decima uses cascaded shadow maps with a high-quality PCSS (Percentage Closer Soft Shadows) filter that produces realistic penumbra softening on all shadow-casting geometry. At Ultra, cascade count increases and the far shadow cascade extends significantly, forcing the engine to render sprawling battlefield geometry — Automaton fortifications, bug-hole terrain, and dense vegetation — into multiple high-resolution depth maps every frame. Dropping from Ultra to High recovers 10–15% GPU time with minimal visible difference beyond shadow softness at range.

Typical impact 3-20% · 6% fps cost

In Helldivers 2, we recommend Reflection Quality at Medium (6% fps cost).

Controls the method and fidelity of surface reflections. Low settings use pre-baked cubemap probes — a single texture lookup per pixel. Medium enables screen-space reflections (SSR) that ray-march through the depth buffer to find reflected geometry. High uses higher-resolution SSR with more march steps. Ultra may enable planar reflections (re-rendering the scene from a mirrored viewpoint) or RT reflections (hardware-accelerated rays). The cost escalation from cubemaps to SSR to RT is dramatic — cubemaps are nearly free, SSR costs 3-8%, and RT reflections cost 15-25%.

In Helldivers 2: Helldivers 2 uses screen-space reflections layered over environment reflection probes baked into each planet biome. At High, SSR ray-march step count is maximized, producing accurate wet-surface and metallic armor reflections. Medium halves the march steps, reducing quality on puddles and Automaton metalwork but recovering 5–8% GPU time. Off falls back entirely to cubemap probes — noticeably flat on water surfaces in swamp and rain biomes but a worthwhile trade on GPU-limited systems.

Typical impact 5-18% · 8% fps cost

In Helldivers 2, we recommend Volumetric Fog at Medium (8% fps cost).

Renders physically-based 3D fog that interacts with lighting, shadows, and participating media density. The engine allocates a 3D froxel (frustum-voxel) volume texture — typically 160x90x64 or higher — and ray-marches through it from each pixel, accumulating scattered light and extinction at each step. Each froxel samples the shadow map to determine direct illumination, applies the Henyey-Greenstein phase function for anisotropic scattering, and accumulates density from noise textures or analytical fog volumes. The cost is substantial because every visible pixel requires a full volumetric integration.

In Helldivers 2: Decima's volumetric atmosphere system is one of its signature features — froxel-based 3D fog volumes interact with every light source, including dynamic muzzle flashes, explosion fireballs, and the hellpod re-entry streaks. At High, the froxel grid resolution is substantial and each light source participates in the scatter calculation, making dense combat scenarios with multiple stratagems firing simultaneously genuinely expensive. Dropping to Medium or Low reduces froxel resolution and light participation count, recovering 8–12% GPU frame time in heavy firefights.

Typical impact 3-12% · 5% fps cost

In Helldivers 2, we recommend Ambient Occlusion at Medium (5% fps cost).

Computes soft shadowing in crevices and where surfaces meet by estimating how much ambient light is occluded at each pixel. SSAO samples the depth buffer in a hemisphere around each pixel, testing for nearby occluders. HBAO+ uses ray-marching along the depth buffer horizon. GTAO uses a multi-directional horizon search with cosine-weighted integration for physically correct results. Each method runs as a fullscreen compute or pixel shader pass — higher quality modes increase sample count from 4 (SSAO) to 32+ (GTAO Ultra), directly scaling the per-pixel ALU cost.

In Helldivers 2: Helldivers 2 implements GTAO (Ground Truth Ambient Occlusion) in Decima's lighting pass, adding contact-shadow depth to crevices in terrain, underneath bug carapaces, and around Automaton structural joints. At High, the multi-directional horizon search uses a high sample count that scales visibly with resolution. Medium provides a perceptually close result with roughly half the per-pixel ALU cost. Off removes the pass entirely — scenes look flatter but frame time drops 4–8% depending on resolution and scene complexity.

Typical impact 3-12% · 8% fps cost

In Helldivers 2, we recommend Level of Detail (LOD) at High (8% fps cost).

Governs the distance thresholds at which objects transition between LOD tiers. The engine uses screen-space projected size or distance-based heuristics to swap between high-poly and simplified meshes. Higher settings push these transition distances further, keeping detailed geometry on screen longer. This increases total triangle count, draw calls, and vertex buffer memory. In UE5 titles using Nanite, this controls the aggressiveness of the virtual geometry streaming system.

In Helldivers 2: Controls the distance thresholds at which Decima transitions props, enemy models, and structural assets between LOD tiers. At Ultra, high-poly Automaton hulks and Terminid chargers maintain their full mesh complexity at considerable range — relevant in Helldivers 2's large-scale engagements where dozens of enemies are simultaneously visible. Lower settings accelerate LOD transitions, reducing vertex buffer load and draw call count across the scene. Low can introduce noticeable mesh pop-in on distant enemies during bot drops, making Medium a reasonable compromise for performance-limited systems.

Typical impact 3-15% · 10% fps cost

In Helldivers 2, we recommend Effect Quality at High (10% fps cost).

Controls the visual fidelity of gameplay effects including explosions, weapon impacts, ability VFX, and environmental interactions. Higher settings increase particle emitter counts per effect, use higher-resolution flipbook or mesh particles instead of simple sprites, enable GPU particle simulation via compute shaders, and add dynamic lighting from effects (each explosion spawning a temporary point light). The cost is highly variable — intense combat with multiple overlapping effects can produce 4-8x overdraw from layered transparent particles.

In Helldivers 2: Orbital strikes, airstrikes, and bug breaches create massive particle/destruction effects. Reduce for stable FPS during heavy combat with 4 players.

Typical impact 5-18% · 10% fps cost

In Helldivers 2, we recommend Vegetation Quality at High (10% fps cost).

Controls density, draw distance, and model complexity of all vegetation (grass, bushes, flowers, ferns). The engine uses GPU instancing or indirect draw calls to render thousands of vegetation instances. Higher settings increase instance count per square meter, push the draw distance further, and use higher-poly plant meshes. The primary GPU cost comes from massive overdraw — vegetation cards are alpha-tested, and dense foliage layers produce 4-8x overdraw. Wind animation adds per-vertex ALU cost in the vertex shader.

In Helldivers 2: Decima engine renders dense alien flora. Higher settings increase draw distance and density — major impact on Jungle/Forest planet biomes.

Typical impact 3-10% · 6% fps cost

In Helldivers 2, we recommend Terrain Quality at High (6% fps cost).

Controls terrain mesh tessellation density, heightmap resolution, and texture splatting layer count. Higher settings increase the number of terrain patches submitted to the tessellation pipeline (hull/domain shaders) and enable more material blend layers per patch — each layer requiring its own albedo, normal, and roughness texture fetches. Terrain rendering is particularly bandwidth-heavy because the large screen coverage means nearly every pixel on the ground plane runs the full multi-layer blend shader.

In Helldivers 2: Decima renders Helldivers 2's destructible and non-destructible terrain using a multi-layer material blend shader with per-patch tessellation. At Ultra, splatmap blend layers increase, heightmap tessellation density rises, and the terrain shader samples additional detail normal maps — all computed across the large world-space footprint visible in a typical engagement. The constant ground-plane coverage makes terrain quality particularly bandwidth-heavy since nearly every pixel on the ground runs the full blend shader. Medium reduces tessellation passes and blend layer count, recovering 5–10% GPU time.

Typical impact 2-15% · 2% fps cost

In Helldivers 2, we recommend Anti-Aliasing at TAA (2% fps cost).

Smooths jagged edges (aliasing) on geometric boundaries. FXAA is a single-pass edge-detection blur — cheap but softens the image. TAA accumulates multiple frames using motion vectors, sampling sub-pixel jitter offsets to reconstruct smoother edges — moderate cost with potential ghosting. SMAA uses pattern-matching edge detection with a more intelligent blend. MSAA runs the rasterizer at 2x/4x the sample count, evaluating coverage for each triangle edge — expensive because it multiplies ROP work and render target memory, but produces sharp geometry edges without blur.

In Helldivers 2: Helldivers 2 uses TAA which causes notable image blur. The community-recommended approach is pairing DLSS/FSR Quality with sharpening.

Typical impact -30-80% · no measurable cost

In Helldivers 2, the recommended preset leaves NVIDIA DLSS off — little visual loss for the frames it returns.

Deep Learning Super Sampling — NVIDIA's AI-based temporal upscaling that runs on dedicated Tensor Core hardware. The engine renders at a lower internal resolution and feeds the reduced-resolution frame, motion vectors, and depth buffer to a neural network that reconstructs a high-resolution output. DLSS 3+ adds optical flow-based frame generation on Ada/Blackwell architectures. The FPS gain comes from rendering fewer pixels — Quality mode renders ~67% of native pixels, Performance ~50%, Ultra Performance ~33%.

In Helldivers 2: DLSS 2/3 is natively integrated into Helldivers 2's Decima rendering pipeline, feeding the engine's motion vectors and depth buffer directly into NVIDIA's Transformer-based reconstruction network. Quality mode renders at approximately 67% of native linear resolution — at 1440p output this means a ~960p internal render — and the network reconstructs sharp output with minimal ghosting even on fast-moving stratagems and bug swarms. Performance mode is viable at 4K on mid-range RTX hardware. DLSS Frame Generation is not currently supported in this title.

Typical impact -25-70% · no measurable cost

In Helldivers 2, the recommended preset leaves AMD FSR off — little visual loss for the frames it returns.

FidelityFX Super Resolution — AMD's upscaling technology available on all GPUs. FSR 2.0+ uses temporal accumulation similar to TAA — it combines multiple jittered lower-resolution frames using motion vectors and a depth buffer to reconstruct a higher-resolution output via a multi-pass compute shader pipeline. The pipeline includes depth clip detection, motion vector dilation, luminance instability detection, and a reconstruction pass with Lanczos-based resampling. Unlike DLSS, FSR runs on standard compute units rather than dedicated AI hardware, working vendor-agnostically.

In Helldivers 2: FSR 2 is supported as the vendor-agnostic upscaling path, making temporal reconstruction accessible on AMD and Intel GPUs. The multi-pass compute pipeline — motion vector dilation, disocclusion detection, and Lanczos-based reconstruction — runs on standard shader cores rather than dedicated AI hardware, with a modest compute overhead compared to DLSS. Quality mode at 1440p renders internally near 1080p and produces acceptable results in Helldivers 2, though fine vegetation detail and thin Automaton structures can exhibit slightly more temporal instability than DLSS at equivalent modes. Ultra Performance is not recommended below 4K.

Typical impact 1-5% · 1% fps cost

In Helldivers 2, we recommend Motion Blur at On (1% fps cost).

Applies directional blur to moving objects based on per-pixel motion vectors. The engine writes a motion vector buffer during the G-buffer pass — each pixel stores a 2D velocity derived from the difference between current and previous frame positions. The post-process shader samples the color buffer along each pixel's motion vector, averaging multiple taps to produce directional streaking. The cost is a single fullscreen pass with 8-16 dependent texture fetches per pixel. Many competitive players disable this for image clarity.

In Helldivers 2: Helldivers 2's motion blur implementation samples per-pixel motion vectors from Decima's G-buffer pass to apply directional streaking during the post-processing composite. With the fast third-person camera movement common in Helldivers 2 — evasive dives, weapon swaps under fire, calling in stratagems — motion blur can significantly obscure situational awareness during chaotic bug breach or bot drop moments. The GPU cost is a single post-process pass and is minimal. Most players disable it for visual clarity rather than performance, but it has no measurable FPS impact in either state.