Spreading democracy across the galaxy in Helldivers 2 is difficult but glorious work, so it’s important to arm yourself with the most effective equipment possible. This is true for both your in-game loadout and the components in your PC, and it turns out that an Nvidia graphics card will help your missions run more smoothly than an AMD GPU.
While it’s well understood that Nvidia makes the best graphics cards for ray traced (RT) gaming, AMD typically has the edge when it comes to standard rasterization. This should give the red team an advantage in Helldivers 2 as the game doesn’t feature any RT effects but, strangely, this doesn’t appear to be the case.
Comparing Helldivers 2 frame rates captured on the GeForce RTX 4080 and Radeon RX 7900 XT, the performance gap is surprisingly large. At best, team red’s pixel pusher falls behind by 31fps at 4K but its worst result sees a 56fps delta at 1080p.
This is according to findings by Notebookcheck, who paired the aforementioned graphics cards with an Intel Core i9 13900K. This is still one of the best gaming CPUs around, despite being replaced with the Core i9 14900K, so there’s limited danger of processor bottlenecks here.
It’s worth noting that the outlet did capture its Helldivers 2 performance data in the game’s ship instead of being knee-deep in bugs or bots. This does help maintain parity between tests as this environment is much less dynamic than missions, but they’re not wholly indicative of performance planet-side. Even so, there’s little reason to believe the frame rate gap observed here would disappear in a place in desperate need of democracy.
There doesn’t appear to be a clear explanation for why the RX 7900 XT lags behind the RTX 4080 by such a margin, especially given Helldivers 2 would have been primarily developed for the PlayStation 5 (which uses an AMD RDNA 2 GPU). Whether there’s optimizations to be made with the game itself or in team red’s drivers is anyone’s guess, but we can only hope the performance gap closes with subsequent updates.
Check out the Helldivers 2 system requirements if you’re unsure whether your system can run the game, despite its relatively low demands. If you’re thinking about upgrading your graphics card to play the game, give our GeForce RTX 4070 Super review a read.