Something to look forward to: Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II offered one of the earliest glimpses of current-generation video game graphics when Ninja Theory unveiled the game in 2019. Now we know what the company predicts users need to play the final product, which could push Unreal Engine 5 further than prior technical showcases.
Ninja Theory recently published the full PC specs for Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II, which ships on May 21. Footage released thus far positions the game as one of the most technically ambitious yet released, and the hardware requirements align with some of the most demanding recent games like Immortals of Aveum and Alan Wake II.
Playing Senua’s Saga on low settings at 1080p requires a GeForce GTX 1070, Radeon RX 5700, Intel Arc A50 graphics card, or better. At the opposite end of the scale, native 4K gameplay unsurprisingly necessitates top-end GPUs like the RTX 4080 and RX 7900 XTX, and no Intel Arc card is up to the task.
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Oddly, the spec sheet places the Arc A70 in the tier advised for 1440p gameplay alongside the RTX 3080 and RX 6800 XT, despite the Intel GPU’s typical performance falling far below the other two. Arc owners interested in the game might want to wait for post-launch benchmarks.
While the system requirements don’t mention framerate, it’s safe to assume they target 30fps gameplay. The spec sheet also states that upscaling and frame generation can improve performance beyond the expectations of the listed hardware components. Senua’s Saga supports DLSS 3, FSR 3, and XeSS 1.3 (XeSS doesn’t include a frame generation solution yet, only upscaling).
The game requires at least 16 GB of system RAM, which has become standard. However, those with only 8GB of VRAM should be fine unless they set the resolution at 4K. Senua’s Saga requires 70GB of storage space.
Over the last few years, previews of the sequel to Team Ninja’s 2017 story-based action-adventure game have made boastful technological promises. We finally got the first close look at live gameplay last month. High-quality footage reveals liberal use of Unreal Engine 5 features like Virtual Shadow Maps, high-density Nanite polygon rendering, and shadowing. However, figuring out the game’s approach to lighting is tricky. It’s unclear to what degree Senua’s Saga employs features like Lumen and ray tracing.
Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II lands on Steam and Xbox Game Pass on May 21. Developers have been slow to ship games using Unreal Engine 5. However, two other high-profile releases are set to follow Hellblade II this year – Black Myth: Wukong in August and Stalker 2 in September (hopefully). Wukong will utilize path tracing, making it likely one of 2024’s most demanding PC titles.
