Hell is Us system requirements require an RTX 4090 and upscaling for 4K at 30 fps, which sounds pretty hellish for my gaming PC

If you have the might of an RTX 4090 powering your rig, the Hell is Us system requirements suggest you will be able to run the game at Ultra settings at 4K, aiming for 30 fps average. Curiously, system requirements are all inclusive of upscaling. That’s, well, not great, but there is a little nuance as to why Hell is Us’ publisher has announced those numbers and what they mean.

Ahead of its release on September 4, the Hell is Us team took to X to announce the game’s system requirements. Notably, it’s a wider spread of settings than many system requirements, ranging from 1080p 30 fps on Medium settings, going all the way up to 4K 30 fps on Ultra, over five separate recommendation settings.

To run the game on minimum, you will need at least an Intel Core i7 7700K / AMD Ryzen 3 3300X with either an Nvidia GTX 1070 or AMD RX 5600 XT. Alongside this, you will need 30 GB of free space on an SSD and 16 GB of RAM. Considering it’s run in Unreal Engine 5, these specs don’t seem too bad.

Recommended specs suggest an Intel Core i7 11700K / AMD Ryzen 5 7600 and either an Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti or an AMD RX 6750 XT. This will get you a performance of 1080p on High settings, with an average fps of 60.

It’s the Ultra settings that seem the most out of place here. The CPU doesn’t change from recommended, and neither does the memory, but you are expected to have an Nvidia RTX 4090 or AMD RX 7900 XTX to run the game on Ultra settings at 4K, averaging 30 fps.

Citing ‘passionate discussion’, a Steam news post elaborated on the Hell is Us system requirements. In that, the Hell is Us team shared what kind of upscaling is present in these system requirements. The game uses TSR (Unreal Engine’s own Temporal Super Resolution upscaling), and Low settings use 50% upscaling, where Ultra uses 10%. It also supports DLSS, XeSS, and FSR, but the upscaling mentioned here is only Unreal’s upscaling.

Hell is Us is built on Unreal Engine 5, which is an engine infamous for being a bit tough on hardware, thanks in part to fancy reflection and lighting engines. The game is being developed by Rogue Factor, which previously released games like Mordheim: City of the Damned and Necromunda: Underhive Wars. Hell is Us, unlike those previous two games, is an entirely original work, and it made quite an impression after years of silence at Sony’s State of Play in September last year.

The team has clarified that the system requirements are “ideal specs” and it “doesn’t mean you can’t run the game on lower settings”. The team continues: “We’d rather be cautious than risk disappointing players by overpromising.”

If you’re worried your rig can’t run in or don’t quite trust those figures, you can download a demo for the game via the Hell is Us Steam page right now and test it for yourself.