Introduction

"Hellblade II: Senua's Saga," developed by Ninja Theory and published by Microsoft Xbox Game Studios, is the sequel to "Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice" (2017). The game continues the story of Senua, a female warrior grappling with severe mental health issues and psychosis. Set in a dark, mythological version of 9th century Iceland, Senua embarks on a journey driven by her inner demons and visions. As she faces new and terrifying challenges, Senua must confront her past and uncover the truth behind her haunting visions. Ninja Theory is known for their detailed representation of mental health issues—"Hellblade II" aims to offer an even more profound and emotionally impactful experience than its predecessor.


Hellblade II: Senua's Saga leverages Epic's Unreal Engine 5 to deliver stunning visuals through advanced rendering techniques. The game utilizes Nanite technology for highly detailed environments and Lumen for dynamic global illumination and reflections. Despite these advanced graphics, the game does not implement hardware ray tracing, instead it relies on software methods provided by Unreal Engine to achieve realistic lighting and shadows.

In terms of upscalers, almost everything is included. There's support for NVIDIA DLSS 2 Super Resolution, AMD FSR 2 Super Resolution and Intel XeSS. Frame Generation using NVIDIA DLSS 3 is supported, there is no support for AMD FSR 3 Frame Generation though.

This benchmark review will evaluate the performance of Hellblade II on a wide selection of modern graphics cards, show image quality comparisons and look at what's required in terms of VRAM usage.

Screenshots

All screenshots were taken at maximum settings, with upscaling and frame generation disabled. The gallery can be navigated with the cursor keys.

Graphics Settings

• The "Accessibility" menu near the top has a setting to set Motion Blur to zero (down from the default maximum of 10)
• Hellblade II supports running windowed and borderless, there is no exclusive fullscreen setting. You can achieve this through manual config edits though (set FullscreenMode=0).
• You may disable V-Sync, there is no hidden FPS cap and the game isn't CPU limited at all
• Upscale Method supports "DLSS," "FSR," "XeSS" and "TSR," which is Unreal Engine's own temporal upscaler
• With TSR you can set the scaling level as a percentage (or 100% for native)
• There is no option for "no upscaling," but TSR + 100% scaling is the closest thing
• FSR has support for "Native AA," which is AMD's equivalent to NVIDIA DLAA
• DLAA is supported, too
• When you enable DLSS Frame Generation, you MUST select a DLSS scaling mode, but "DLAA" is an option
• There's three quality presets "Low," "Medium" and "High." Selecting "High" sets quality to maximum, you don't have to manually adjust any other setting.
• Besides that there are several additional options for performance fine-tuning, as our comparison screenshots show, there's very little visual difference, but a pretty serious performance delta between them.