Helldivers 2 has a new update that aims to improve the extraction shooter's performance, a source of some woe lately among Super Earth's democracy-managers. It introduces support for upscalers – specifically, FSR 3.1.5 (with FSR 4.0.3 for certain GPUs), DLSS 4.5 and XeSS 3.0 - together with variable rate shading and dynamic resolution scaling.

The patch also tunes the performance on high reflection settings, adds some new resolution settings for more capable monitors, and cleans up VRAM management on PCs that are embarrassingly short on that VRAM malarkey. Is your PC a little VRAM-light? Shhh now, we don't judge here at Rock Potato Shotgun Dot Com. As it happens, I'm writing all this on a Game Gear.

To achieve these technical feats, developers Arrowhead have enlisted the aid of "our friend at Nixxes Software", the seasoned support studio who've worked on PC ports of Death Stranding 2, Horizon Forbidden West and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. "From upscaling technologies and latency-reduction features to various optimizations and stability fixes, this patch is built to help you stay on target when the battlefield gets chaotic," explains a Steam post.

As for how it's going down with the Helldivers 2 faithful: would it surprise you terribly to learn that some people are spitting mad? Initial online gossip suggests that a few of the patch features could use some additional patching. Here's a Reddit post about the DLSS implementation, and here's a Steam thread of people complaining that they're getting lower frame rates in the wake of the update.

If mileages vary on the performance gains, everybody seems keen on the somewhat lobbed-in fix for "an issue where Helldivers were unable to manually climb small obstacles and ledges without auto-climb". Gosh, that sounds like it must have gotten a few of you killed.

Arrowhead have grander plans for Helldivers 2 this summer, including longer Galactic War campaigns with branching outcomes.