HELLBLADE II: Ninja Theory explains how it reached 60 fps on consoles

“It’s a setting that players can select in the game options to run at 60 FPS. You can switch between performance and quality form mode. In PlayStation 5 Pro, you can choose between two favorite upscalers: PSSR and TSR.”

“From the beginning, our performance approach has to keep the original film experience intact. We were determined not to remove any features from the game in this version. Instead, we made a number of targeted optimizations and performance -specific performance adjustments. ”

“For the original launch of Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II, we optimized aiming at the 30Hz target, going a little further to ensure a margin that would result at a more stable frame rate and also facilitate scaling into different PC hardware.”

“With that, we ended up having a clearance in the use of the CPU in quality mode. This clearance allowed some performance gain by reducing graphics settings, but it was not enough to reach 60 frames per second.”

“This same margin generated 2 to 4 millisecond peaks that did not affect the frame rate in quality mode. However, in performance mode, these peaks began to occupy a significant part of the frame time.”

“Therefore, we invest a lot of effort to identify and remove these peaks. It often involved distributing tasks along various frames, especially in character loading and items, level streaming and more.”

“As expected in such a game, much of the CPU processing was used with characters, animations and physics. We recovered most performance by making targeted animations improvements. In addition, we adapted our Anim Blueprints to recognize when the game is in performance mode, allowing you to adjust certain features and make proper reductions when necessary.”

“We also implemented an animated frame budget allocator, which allowed us to define fixed limits. This is essential for 60Hz games, ensuring a consistent time time. Everything that went on this budget would also be postponed to later frames. We also created a priority system for characters, ensuring that main characters from a scene were not affected.”

“With anim blueprints adapted to performance mode, we can also reduce the complexity of characters physics exclusively to this mode. In the GPU, we reach our goals combining scalability settings at lower resolutions and lighting and shadow -specific adjustments, reducing their cost.”

“We have also made improvements in post-processing and visual effects (VFX). In addition, we make our systems aware of performance mode, allowing you to adjust specific features in this context.”