Helldivers 2 CEO says DLSS is ‘not necessary’ — and he’s right

The CEO for Arrowhead Games, developer of Helldivers 2, caught some flak for a controversial take on nowhere else than X (formerly Twitter), saying that Nvidia’s DLSS is “cool tech, but not necessary.”

The lack of branded upscaling tools in Helldivers 2 is strange, especially given the fact that the title has quickly become “one of the most entertaining co-op games” of the year, as you can read about in our Helldivers 2 review. Thankfully, Helldivers 2 doesn’t need DLSS.

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The game uses its own Temporal Super Resolution (TSR), which offers either upscaling or supersampling depending on how much GPU power you have. You can read more about how it works in our Helldivers 2 PC performance guide, but the game is remarkably stable overall. Despite matchmaking issues, the performance of the title has been rock-solid since launch. That’s true even with pedestrian cards like the RTX 3060, where we were able to achieve above 60 frames per second (fps) at 1080p with all of the settings maxed out.

According to Johan Pilestedt, CEO of Arrowhead Games, upscaling tools like DLSS and FSR wouldn’t help much in Helldivers 2 due to the fact that “most of the performance load is on the CPU since we simulate everything.” Although upscaling may not drastically improve performance, frame generation features like DLSS 3 and FSR 3 could get around a CPU bottleneck.

It looks like that could be on the horizon. Pilestedt hasn’t said if DLSS or FSR is coming to Helldivers 2, but in a response on X, the developer agreed that both FSR 3 and DLSS should be added at the same time, if they’re added at all. At the moment, that doesn’t seem to be one of Arrowhead’s priorities: “I love DLSS and other performance-boosting tech. But when you are in a prio meeting and it’s ‘more awesome