HELLDIVERS™

HELLDIVERS™

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Shadows and anti-aliasing fixes!
By GGesus
Some tweaks to improve visuals!
   
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Intro

The other day while spreading democracy I had a wish to make it more beautiful. So I started to mess around and here what I found:
Shadows Fix
For shadows fix you need to find your own user_settings.config file.
Here a path to it: C:\Users\YourPcName\AppData\Roaming\Arrowhead\Helldivers\user_settings.config
Or you can simply put inside windows search bar: %appdata% and to proceed from there.
Open the user_settings.config using a text redactor of your choice:

We're interested in shadow_map_size:
In game shadow settings are quite underwhelming:
Low = 512
Medium = 1024
High = 2048
I found that value of 8192 is sweet spot for me, but you can play around with it by yourself.
Here a comparison between 2048 and 8192:
Flag the config file as Read Only!!!
Otherwise after changing anything inside game settings, shadows value will reset. And you will need to repeat the whole thing.
Antialiasing tweaks
The Anti aliasing is quite bad as well. Only option being FXAA.
Here a comparison FXAA vs None
As you can see FXAA does smoothing of edges but makes game scene more blurry.
But there is a other option, you can use NVIDIA's tech called DSR.
Basically speaking it's gonna render the game in higher resolution and then scale down. Quite expensive on performance side but gets the job done well.
Inside NVIDIA Control panel go to Manage 3D Settings

Then go to DSR - Factors
An there you (probably) will be given two options: DL scaling and Legacy Scaling
DL scaling: DL stands for deep learning this is the new version that uses Tensor cores if your video card has them. (RTX starting from 20XX series). Simply speaking it`s more performance without losing much visual fidelity.
Legacy Scaling: it`s more costly but supported on all legacy video cards. And gives more visual fidelity!
No matter the your choice I recommend to choose 1.78x or 2.25x.

Remember your new resolution! In my example it`s 3840x2160. but you can use any!
Then click the OK and then Apply in right bottom of the window.
Then go to user_settings.config file (instruction how to find is above), and write your new resolution in screen_resolution blank.
Remember to disable Read Only box inside properties of file before implementing changes! And set it back after!

Then startup the game and check resolution in settings!
Enjoy!

For amd users
AMD has analog of DSR called VSR.
Im to lazy to describe it so here a link to official amd guide: https://www.amd.com/en/resources/support-articles/faqs/DH-010.html
Closing thoughts
If you know more possible graphics shenanigans please let me know!
Inside user_settings.config file, there are a lot of disabled options.
I tried to play around with them, and almost all off them does not seem to work or simply crashing the game.
Or some gonna make game look like this:
In case I will find some more possible tweaks I will put an update here.
If It was helpful then rate this guide!


3 Comments
punchobastardo 31 Dec, 2024 @ 5:36pm 
Back in the days when I used to play the game with a nvidia card I could just override the AA from nvidia's control panel and put SSAA or MSAA there plus setting the Anisotropic Filtering to x16 iirc.
Daegon 28 Dec, 2024 @ 9:42pm 
Simply excellent. Thank you for sharing this info! :goldvein:
seduce me 27 Dec, 2024 @ 4:04pm 
:hunted: