Hellblade II: Senua's Saga [RELEASE DATE 21 MAY 2024]

mrk said:
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Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 Benchmarks & PC Performance Analysis

Powered by Unreal Engine 5, it's time to benchmark Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 and examine its performance on the PC.
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Good article, but it's not quite the full picture for them to say the traversal stutters happen on consoles too, if they happen (which they don't always, as shown in the Digital Foundry video) they tend to be a lot less severe. From what I can gather the consoles' unified memory architecture and lower level optimisation help a lot here.
 
Keep in mind not all PC systems will see traversal stutter, or if there is any it is so small that it may even go unnoticed because it only exhibits across a single frame or few at most because the framerate is running high. frametime hitches like that tend to be more noticeable at lower framerates, so those at 60fps will see the longer hitch times per frame due to being at 60fps vs the frame to frame delay that is much lower in ms at say 120fps - All the more reason to leverage the advantages of frame gen in stuff like this to mitigate any noticeable traversal hitching.

There are a few in this game but they are infrequent, and at least for me, happen for such a short frametime that it doesn't even matter really. It is what I'd call "expected" for an unreal 5 game today, vs the regular and rather annoying hitching that happens in other games (Jedi Survivor, for example or Dead Space Remake).

I reached half way through chapter 5 Baroarvik today and am on Another Question. This chapter really shows of the game'UE5 visuals. The scenery is quite stunning along with a cool fight segment too against sun shafts. You can actually see some of the traversal hitches here, but they are so brief a mentioned that I probably wouldn't even bother writing about them.


z10m said:

this is what I'm talking about.

Just tried all 4 upscaling or rather AA options and strangely enough fsr3 looks the best to me as while it shimmers just as much if not slightly more at least it gives me best sharpness without looking over sharpened but of course I can't use frame generation with that. :mad:
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Got to an outdoors bit this eve and checked this out, doesn't happen to me, using DLSS Quality and with or without Frame Gen.

 
Completed it before breakfast :cool:

That was very good, as mentioned before, 100% cinematic experience. The script and presentation is exactly how I'd expect a top tier director to put together a psychological horror feature film. Only thing I wasn't a fan of was those doorway symbols you have to muck about finding the symbols to unlock.

Also, this ended up being a free play, I forgot that if you end the game pass subscription within a few days then you get a full refund. Not a bad way to play a game that lasts <10 hours.

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I'll give the game an easy 8/10. It has no replay value, the "new game+" perks are pointless, just different narration voices lol.

Also this is for @Nexus18

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:D

Still, when screen space effects aren't being stupid as usual, the game does make you go wow, and I did play a bit on HDR but felt that HDR wasn't implemented correctly here, there's no proper HDR brightness slider, only default, dark and bright (???), and in-game the luminance didn't feel natural, like overly saturated similar to how Horizon FW was initially before they patched it, though not as bad as that.

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Yeah I didn't know either as was expecting to install the xbox app and the gameba but when I went to the Windows Store it said I could just download the game directly through the store lol and it appeared in installed Windows App in the start menu. For once being "too good to be true" was not what it typically is lol.
 
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mrk said:
Yeah I didn't know either as was expecting to install the xbox app and the gameba but when I went to the Windows Store it said I could just download the game directly through the store lol and it appeared in installed Windows App in the start menu. For once being "too good to be true" was not what it typically is lol.
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Oh I didn't know that! I installed Xbox app sans gamebar.
Oh yeah I see, if you have GP then they show as 'Included'. That means I can just download through the Windows store and then add them to steam instead without another launcher. Nice one.
The only advantage the app brings that I can see is the list of games that are available, but then I guess I could do that on the website.
 
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Finished this just now and it was....ok. Looked stunning obviously.

I had a very odd problem though, sometimes the game would drop to like 5fps for a minute or so at a time. When I checked on MSI afterburner during these moments my GPU usage was locked hard to 100%, but the temperature was falling back to ambient - as though the GPU was doing no work at all. It was very strange! The CPU would also be going haywire with the usage flying up and down like nobodies business. I suppose it was just a bug with the game.

All in all it was a decent experience, and very short - 6 hours or so!
 
Played a bit more of this today, finally seeing some of the Unreal engine doing what I saw in the tech demos a while back. It’s impressive, the stones, the water, the faces. It’s easy to take it for granted, but it’s crazy when you think how far visuals have come in the last 10 years or so.
 
Just played an hour or so via GP, it's almost certainly the best visual game I have played to date, more of an experience than an actual game. The audio is great too, impressive stuff and I have everything maxed and getting good FPS on my 3080 at 1440, not sure if I will finish it though.... no kill steaks or anything :D
 
Maximum Triceratops said:
Just played an hour or so via GP, it's almost certainly the best visual game I have played to date, more of an experience than an actual game. The audio is great too, impressive stuff and I have everything maxed and getting good FPS on my 3080 at 1440, not sure if I will finish it though.... no kill steaks or anything :D
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Ninja Theory have done a marvellous job with the visuals, audio design and cinematic feel of this game. Yes, I agree it's an experience ... but a worthwhile one. Even though it's short, it's such an intense atmosphere I had to play it in 1 hour chunks ( similar to the first game ).
 
Quite a few games are going to be like that and I'm all for it. UE5 affords us these film-style experiences where we control the main character and the "Movie" plays out over several hours. That in my books is well worth the asking price as no other game engine can quite manage audio/video quite like what UE now can.
 
mrk said:
Quite a few games are going to be like that and I'm all for it. UE5 affords us these film-style experiences where we control the main character and the "Movie" plays out over several hours. That in my books is well worth the asking price as no other game engine can quite manage audio/video quite like what UE now can.
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I haven't really done any reading on this new engine, will it crossover to more conventional games and have the scope to give this quality? There isn't a lot going on in this game and I assume that's how they can deliver such good viduals?
 
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It's a psychological narrative, as noted in numerous places by now it's an experience and you're guiding the story along with the bits to do along the way, fight, run, soak in the atmosphere etc. The visuals are thanks to UE5, all UE5 games from here on are going to look and feel like movies in many ways because that's what the engine is capable of and makes it easy for devs to do.
 
Think I’m on the last stretch of this. Loved the cave segment, absolutely stunning on an OLED. Not quite as good as the first for me and the letterbox is annoying, but I am enjoying it. At 4K it’s definitely stretching my GPU. Can’t wait to get more games in this engine.
 
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