Although I always thought that the race for graphic hyperrealism is not as widespread as it is often perceived, Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 is definitely one of the this games. The kind where there are probably twelve artists dedicated to recreating visible pores, something like that. The focus is so much on looking pretty that he didn’t even notice that the title and subtitle were mixed up.
Certainly Hellblade 2 is a tough test for older hardware, as it relies heavily on DLSS or FSR upscaling to maintain performance. That said, it’s not a Dragons Dogma 2-style technical horror show either. A good balance between graphics and smoothness is achievable on high-end PCs and low-end laptops alike, while frame generation with DLSS 3 can effectively kick the framerates of RTX 40-series GPUs into the butt.
You’ll want to lower some important quality settings when doing this. More on that below. First, let’s review Hellblade 2’s system requirements, because my goodness, there are a lot of them.
Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 System Requirements and PC Performance
You can skimp a little on CPU power in this Pictish action-adventure, requiring at least a crisp Core i5 and clearly mid-range chips for maximum 4K resolution. A more powerful graphics card will pay off, though, especially if you have one with Nvidia DLSS support. FSR 3 is available for upscaling, but it doesn’t have the frame generation component, so RTX card owners might as well stick with the better-looking DLSS. Hopefully you don’t still only have 8GB of RAM, either:
These specs apparently assume you’re sticking with the standard upscaler TSR. With that and the Low Quality preset, I shot a GTX 1070 at an average of 33fps at 1080p – however, after switching to FSR 3 in Quality mode, the speed increased to 43fps, with a negligible drop in image sharpness. Sticking with AMD’s upscaler, the Intel Arc A750 also showed that budget GPUs can get by, hitting 47 fps at 1080p with a combination of medium settings and FSR 3 at quality.
DLSS proved sharper and faster, though. My RTX 4060 struggled a little at first with the High preset, even at 1080p, averaging 38 fps with the default TSR. Switching to DLSS on Quality brought 56 fps out of the box, and since the RTX 4060 supports DLSS 3 Frame Gen, that could go up to 91 fps too. This technology does a good job on laptop GPUs too. My RTX 4050-based laptop, a 1080p MSI Thin GF63, was able to run the Low preset at 51 fps with DLSS upscaling on Quality alone—and with frame generation enabled, it hit 88 fps.
Even on these lower settings, Hellblade 2 remains a respectable game, and since there are apparently no real issues with stuttering, flickering, or any other performance degradation, it’s more suited to lower-end hardware than the MEGA REAL GRAFFIX presentation would suggest. Admittedly, there are limitations – the Steam Deck struggles, and can only run low settings above 30fps when FSR 3 is set to Ultra Performance. Which, in a word, looks like pants. Performance mode is more visually tolerable, but usually puts the framerate in the twenties.
Conversely, Hellblade 2 scales impressively with bigger, shinier GPUs. The RTX 4070 Ti easily managed 78 fps at 1440p/High, albeit aided by DLSS on quality, and Frame Gen topped that at 127 fps. The same card and settings (without Frame Gen) also produced 78 fps at 3440 x 1440, an ultrawide resolution with an unusual side effect: the elimination of the horizontal black bars that appear (and are apparently mandatory) at traditional 16:9. In other words, Hellblade 2 insists when playing in ultrawide. I’m not a fan of it, no matter how cinematic the game wants to be, but at least it’s a win for ultrawide monitor owners who would otherwise have to put up with the stretched/offset UIs of a gaming industry that normally prefers regular widescreen.
The RTX 4070 Ti also performed well at 4K, managing 59 fps on High with DLSS quality (88 fps with frame generation enabled). The best card in my cabinet, the RTX 4090, managed an even smoother 75 fps with DLSS on quality, and rose to 120 fps with frame generation.
Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 Best Settings Guide
Unfortunately, DLSS 3 is superior to most GPUs, but with a combination of regular upscaling and a few lower settings you can get better performance. Don’t be afraid of such compromises on Hellblade 2’s visual merits – as you can see from the comparison below, all three presets, High, Medium and Low, look quite similar, and some of the more visible changes (like foliage and texture quality) actually don’t affect performance that much. Or at all, in many cases.
Armed with an RTX 4060 – I would have used the minimum spec GTX 1070 but wanted to test DLSS and Frame Gen – I tested every single graphics setting at both the highest and lowest quality to determine which one speeds up performance the best. Anything that offers a significant improvement over 38fps, the average result of the High preset at 1080p, is worth considering:
Motion blur: You can lower this value if you just don’t like the effect, but it won’t affect performance in any way. Even when I turned the setting down from 10 to 0, I still got 38 fps. (You’ll also need to go into the Accessibility menu to find the slider, as it’s not in the main graphics menu.)
Custom Upscaler: Forget the standard TSR, even with a faster resolution scale; FSR 3 and DLSS are both faster and, especially in the latter case, look better. DLSS in Quality mode boosted the RTX 4060 up to 56fps, the best result in the range, while FSR 3 proved the best alternative for non-RTX GPUs, with 54fps in Quality mode. Intel XeSS is also available, and reached 53fps in Ultra Quality mode, but is a bit blurrier than FSR 3.
Frame generation: Again, this is exclusive to Nvidia’s RTX 40 series cards, but it’s worth it if your GPU supports it. When enabled, that’s 56 fps, with Quality DLSS upscaling increasing to 91 fps. Just make sure that when you enable frame generation, you also set Nvidia Reflex (a little further down the menu) to On+Boost. This helps deal with the additional input lag.
Variable Rate Shading: VRS, which is intended to improve performance by varying image quality in different parts of the screen, is enabled by default. However, I still had exactly 38 fps after disabling it, so you might as well turn it off and keep everything consistent.
Anti-aliasing: Probably not a problem, as both DLSS and FSR include their own AA technology that replaces the game’s. I couldn’t see any performance difference between High and Low with TSR enabled.
Post-processing quality: Again unchanged 38fps after switching from high to low.
Effect quality: On the low setting it was 39 fps, only 1 fps faster than the high setting. I wouldn’t mind that.
Shadow quality: It’s marginal, but I think the 41 fps you get from going down to Low just about makes it a worthwhile change. At least if you don’t already achieve over 60 fps.
Reflection quality: Another 39fps result on Low. You can see the difference in quality with the water etc. so try to keep it on High.
Global lighting quality: Another setting for the chopping block. Low quality still looks good and helped the RTX 4060 get up to 44 fps, an instant 16% improvement.
Volumetry: You might also want to tone this down, as Low has the RTX 4060 averaging 43 fps.
Texture quality: Leave the setting at “High”. Low didn’t improve performance at all, landing at 38 fps again.
Visibility: Low only produced an average of 39 fps, which is probably not worth the pressure.
Leaf detail: Likewise, turning it down to Low only increased performance by a single frame per second. Stay on High.
It may not be the most sophisticated approach, but setting some of these settings to Low and leaving the rest to High can really boost FPS significantly. But don’t worry, it’s the third-party upscalers that do a lot of the work. Here’s what I would suggest for Hellblade 2:
- Motion blur: 0
- Custom Upscaler: DLSS/FSR 3 on quality
- Variable rate shading: Out of
- Shadow quality: Low
- Global lighting quality: Low
- Volumetry: Low
- Everything else: High
Still on the RTX 4060 at 1080p, that got me 75 fps with DLSS and 73 fps with FSR, with the former increasing to 117 fps with DLSS 3 Frame Generation. But even without that, that’s almost double what the GPU was using at the High preset, and without any painful sacrifice in visual quality. Job is a good man, as the Picts would probably have said.