Nixxes Couldn't Save Helldivers 2's Busted PC Patch

Nixxes Software has one of the strongest reputations in the industry when it comes to PC ports. Death Stranding 2, Horizon Forbidden West, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, the studio's track record speaks for itself. So when Arrowhead announced that Nixxes was helping deliver Helldivers 2's long-awaited performance patch, it felt like the right call. The patch landed yesterday, and the upscalers are broken.

Patch 6.2.5, branded Machinery of Oppression, introduced support for FSR 3.1.5 (with FSR 4.0.3 on supported GPUs), DLSS 4.5, and XeSS 3.0, alongside variable rate shading, dynamic resolution scaling, NVIDIA Reflex, and AMD Anti-Lag 2. On paper, it's a performance overhaul. In practice, players on Steam and Reddit are reporting that every upscaler is effectively unusable at anything below native resolution. "All upscalers are currently broken if you actually want them to upscale," wrote one Reddit user, sharing comparison screenshots showing severe blur and shimmer in DLSS Balanced mode. Another described smoke dissolving into visible pixels, distant objects turning into shimmering mush, and sub-pixel detail vanishing entirely.

The problems aren't limited to one upscaler or one GPU vendor. Players testing FSR and XeSS are hitting the same wall. One particularly detailed Reddit post noted that the Helldiver character model appears to upscale correctly while the rest of the world doesn't, suggesting the implementation may be partially broken rather than entirely non-functional. Some Steam users are also reporting outright crashes and lower frame rates than before the patch, which is the exact opposite of what a performance update should do. On top of all that, a wild visual glitch is turning some players' screens into what looks like a Christmas light show, with neon colours bleeding across the Super Destroyer and mission environments.

The PS5 Pro Exception

Ironically, the one platform where the update seems to have landed well is PS5 Pro. Reports suggest PSSR 1.0 support is working as intended, with reduced flickering and improved image quality. It's a strange inversion: the console version got the clean implementation while the PC side, the one Nixxes was specifically brought in to help with, shipped in this state.

I want to be clear about something here. This isn't a Nixxes hit piece. We don't know how the work was divided between Arrowhead and Nixxes, and it's entirely possible the upscaler integration sits on Arrowhead's side of the codebase. But that's almost the point. Helldivers 2's technical debt runs so deep that even bringing in a studio with Nixxes' pedigree wasn't enough to ship a clean patch. This game has had a pattern of updates that introduce as many problems as they fix, and yesterday's patch fits that pattern perfectly.

Arrowhead described this update as their "opening salvo in an ongoing campaign to improve performance across the fleet." An opening salvo that breaks three upscalers simultaneously is not the confidence-builder they were hoping for. The patch was already slightly delayed because the team was waiting on a fix from platform partners before submission, which makes the current state even harder to explain. Since the update went live, Helldivers 2's Steam user reviews have dropped back into "Mostly Negative" territory. Arrowhead hasn't publicly addressed the upscaler issues yet.

Beyond the upscaler mess, the patch does include some welcome fixes. A bug preventing Helldivers from manually climbing small obstacles and ledges has been resolved, high reflection settings have been tuned, and VRAM management has been improved for lower-spec PCs. Console players on Xbox Series X and PS5 also got a bump to 1440p in Performance Mode, plus VRR support on PS5 and PS5 Pro. Arrowhead has bigger plans for the summer too, including longer Galactic War campaigns with branching outcomes. But none of that matters much if the game's core technical foundation keeps crumbling every time they try to build on it.