Hell is Us has a free demo available to play on Steam right now, and we jumped straight in to see whether the game’s performance is as shaky as its concerning hardware requirements suggest it may be. Unfortunately, hitting a stable frame rate north of 60fps is proving hard without using some form of upscaling.
The Hell is Us system requirements already had us on high alert, but this demo has offered the chance to put its graphical settings to the test, and the results are somewhat disappointing so far. Using our Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 testing rig, the game struggled to hit a stable 60fps without the aid of upscaling at 1440p, suggesting you will need one of the best graphics cards to play the full game at high resolutions with a strong frame rate.
I tested the medium, high, and very high graphical presets on our test rig that also features an Intel Core i7 11700F and 32GB of DDR4 Corsair Vengeance RAM in a dual-channel configuration.
Without upscaling, the medium, high, and very high graphical presets returned frame rates of 59fps, 53fps, and 38fps, respectively, at 1440p. The only time I was able to get above 60fps was when activating Nvidia DLSS, but even then, the impact wasn’t transformative, with the frame rate going from 53fps to 61fps on the high graphical preset using the Quality setting.
The system requirements suggest that to obtain 60fps at 1440p using the high preset, an RTX 3080 is required. Our RTX 4070 has a slight advantage in raw performance, but given that we barely got over 60fps using DLSS on Quality, I have concerns that a more aggressive level of upscaling was used during testing to determine the system requirements.
Upscaling in Hell is Us comes in two forms. There’s a TSR 3D setting right under the graphical preset option, and DLSS, FSR, and XeSS options at the bottom of the graphics menu. TSR 3D Resolution is an upscaler included in the Unreal game engine. It’s automatically enabled within each graphical preset, but we turned it off to get the best idea of performance without upscaling.
When finally caving and enabling DLSS, there wasn’t a huge dip in the image quality, but in some areas where light is protruding through trees onto the environment or character models, the image quality can become quite blurry, with minor ghosting also occurring. Without upscaling enabled, these shadows were very detailed and super clear.
Ultimately, if you’re hoping to run Hell is Us without upscaling, you either need to adjust your expectations or ensure your hardware is well above the system requirements of the graphical preset for which you are aiming.
If you’re looking to lock in exceptional performance, you can try running Hell is Us on an RTX Pro 6000, but it’s set you back a cool $10,000. Instead, why not check out our RTX 5080 review to see if this is the new GPU for you?
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