While I’ve always thought that the race towards graphical hyperrealism isn’t as pervasive as it’s often perceived, Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 is definitely one of those games. The kind that probably has twelve visible pore restoration artists, that sort of thing. She’s so focused on looking pretty that she didn’t even notice that the title and subtitle got mixed up.
Sure, Hellblade 2 is a rough test for older hardware, with a heavy reliance on DLSS or FSR upscaling to sweeten performance. That said, it’s no Dragons Dogma 2-esque tech horror show either. A happy balance between visuals and fluidity is achievable on high-end PCs as well as low-end laptops, while the DLSS 3 generation frames can effectively kick in on RTX 40-series GPUs.
There are some key quality settings you may want to lower in the process, so more on those below. First, let’s reacquaint ourselves with Hellblade 2’s system requirements, because well googly moogly, there are a lot of them.
Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 system requirements and PC performance
This Pictish action-adventure allows you to save a little on CPU power, requiring only a minimally ugly Core i5 and definitely mid-range chips for maximum 4K resolution. However, a more powerful graphics card is worth it, especially if you have one with Nvidia DLSS support; FSR 3 is available for upscaling, but lacks a frame generation component, so RTX card owners could stick with the better-looking DLSS. I hope you don’t have only 8GB of RAM yet:
These specs seem to assume you stick with the default upscaler, TSR. With this plus the Low Quality preset, I recorded the GTX 1070 at an average of 33fps at 1080p – although when switched to FSR 3 in Quality mode, it jumped to 43fps with a negligible drop in image sharpness. Sticking with AMD’s upscaler, the Intel Arc A750 also showed that low-cost GPUs can deliver, hitting 47fps at 1080p with a combination of Medium and FSR 3 quality settings.
However, DLSS turned out to be sharper and faster. My RTX 4060 struggled a bit with the High preset at first, even at 1080p, averaging 38fps with the default TSR. Switching to DLSS quality immediately shot up to 56 fps, and since the RTX 4060 supports DLSS 3 frame gen, it could also boost the speed up to a neat 91 fps. This technology also does a good job on laptop GPUs. My RTX 4050-based, 1080p MSI Thin GF63 laptop could run the Low preset at 51 fps with only DLSS upscaled at the quality level – and with frame generation enabled, it produced 88 fps.
Hellblade 2 remains a good-looking game even at these lower settings, and with the apparent absence of any real problems with stuttering, flickering or other various performance hiccups, it’s more friendly to lower-end hardware than its MEGA REAL GRAFFIX presentation might suggest. . It’s true that there are limits – Steam Deck struggles as it’s only able to run All-Low settings above 30fps with FSR 3 set to Ultra Performance. Which, in a word, looks like pants. Performance mode is visually more tolerable, but usually puts the framerate in the low twenties.
Conversely, Hellblade 2 scales impressively with bigger, shinier GPUs. The RTX 4070 Ti moderated to 78fps at 1440p/High, albeit with DLSS on the quality, and frame gen pushed that up to 127fps. The same card and settings (sans frame gen) also produced 78fps at 3440 x 1440, an ultra-wide resolution with an unusual side benefit: getting rid of the horizontal black bars that appear (and are apparently mandatory) in traditional 16:9. In other words, Hellblade 2 he insists for gaming in ultrawide. I’m not a fan of this, no matter how cinematic the game wants to be, though it’s at least a win for ultrawide monitor owners who would otherwise have to put up with the stretched/out-of-place UIs of a gaming industry that usually favors regular widescreen.
The RTX 4070 Ti also took a decent crack at 4K, managing 59 fps in high quality with DLSS quality (88 fps with frame generation on). The best card in my case, the RTX 4090, managed an even smoother 75 fps with DLSS at a quality level that increased to 120 fps with frame gen.
Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 Best Settings Guide
Sadly, DLSS 3 outperforms most GPUs, but better performance can be yours with a combination of regular upscaling and a few reduced settings. Don’t worry about such cuts to Hellblade 2’s visuals – as you can see from the comparison below, the three High, Medium and Low presets all look pretty similar, and some of the more visible changes (like leaf and texture quality) don’t really affect performance that much. Or not at all, in many cases.
Armed with an RTX 4060 – I would have used a min-spec GTX 1070, but I wanted to test DLSS and frame gen – I compared every single graphics setting at the highest and lowest quality to determine which was best for speeding up performance. . Anything with a significant improvement to 38fps, the average result on High preset at 1080p, is worth considering:
Motion Blur: You can lower this value if you just don’t like the effect, although it won’t affect performance. I still got 38 fps when I dropped it from 10 to 0. (You’ll also need to head to the Accessibility menu and find the slider, as it’s not in the main graphics menu.)
Custom upscaler: Forget the default TSR, even with its resolution scaling on the faster setting; FSR 3 and DLSS are faster and especially look better in the latter case. DLSS in quality mode pushed the RTX 4060 up to 56 fps, the best result of all, while FSR 3 proved to be the best alternative for non-RTX GPUs with 54 fps on quality. Intel XeSS is also available and achieved 53 fps 53 fps in Ultra Quality mode, although it is slightly blurrier than FSR 3.
Frame generation: Again, this is exclusive to Nvidia RTX 40 series cards, but worth having if your GPU supports it. When enabled, it’s 56fps with DLSS quality upsampling to 91fps. Just make sure if you enable frame gen you also set Nvidia Reflex (a bit further down the menu) to On+Boost. This will help deal with the added input lag.
Variable speed shading: VRS, which aims to improve performance by changing the visual quality in different parts of the screen, is turned on by default. However, I still got exactly 38fps after disabling it, so you might as well turn it off and keep everything consistent.
Anti aliasing: This probably won’t be a problem as both DLSS and FSR have their own AA technology that beats the game’s own technology. For what it’s worth, I saw no difference in performance between high and low when TSR was enabled.
Post-processing quality: Still another unchanged 38 frames per second after switching from High to Low.
Effects quality: Low gave me 39fps, just 1fps faster than High. I wouldn’t bother.
Shadow quality: It’s marginal, but I think the 41fps you get by dipping to Low makes it a worthwhile change. At least if you’re not already pulling 60fps-plus.
Reflection quality: Another 39 frames per second on Low. You can see the difference in water quality and such, so try to keep it on High.
Global lighting quality: Additional settings for the chopper log. The low quality still looks good and helped the RTX 4060 up to 44fps, an immediate 16% improvement.
Volumetric: Maybe tone it down too, as Low got the RTX 4060 averaging 43fps.
Texture quality: Keep it high. Low did absolutely nothing to help performance, again landing at 38fps.
Surveillance: Low only produced an average of 39 frames per second, which probably isn’t worth the squeeze.
Leaf detail: Likewise, dropping to Low only increased performance by one frame per second. Hold yourself tall.
It might not be the most sophisticated approach, but slapping a lot of these settings down to Low and leaving the rest on High really does make big FPS gains. But make no mistake, third-party upscalers do much of the heavy lifting. Here is what I would suggest for Hellblade 2:
- Motion Blur: 0
- Custom upscaler: DLSS/FSR 3 about quality
- Variable speed shading: Off
- Shadow quality: Low
- Global lighting quality: Low
- Volumetric: Low
- Everything else: High
Still on the RTX 4060 at 1080p it got me 75fps with DLSS and 73fps with FSR, the former was able to increase to 117fps with DLSS frame generation 3. Even without that, mind you, it’s painfully close to double that , which pushed the GPU to High preset, and without a painful decrease in visual quality. Job is a good man, as the Picts would probably say.