WTF?! It's fair to assume that if you've got an RTX 4090 in your PC, you'll expect to easily play most games at their highest settings in 4K. That's most games, not all of them. Hell is Us, for example, can only manage 30 fps in this setup – and that's with upscaling enabled.
The Unreal Engine 5-powered Hell is Us is still three months away from its official September 4 launch date, but you can try out the free demo on Steam now.
The game's X account has also published the full PC requirements list. As is the case with so many modern releases these days, there is a disclaimer noting that these ideal specs assume upscaling is enabled.
If you can live with 30fps@1080p at medium settings, a GTX 1070 or a Radeon RX 5600 XT paired with an Intel Core i7 7700K or AMD Ryzen 3 3300X will suffice.
The Recommended specs – 60fps@1080p with high settings – ask for an RTX 2080 Ti or RX 6750 XT 12GB with an Intel i7-11700k or Ryzen 5 7600.
This recommended CPU doesn't change as the spec levels move up the stack, only the GPUs do: RTX 3080/RX 6800 XT for High, RTX 3090/RX 6900 XT for Very High, and RTX 4090/RX 7900 XTX for Ultra.
The game's team explained the upscaling requirements seen in the specs list. Hell is Us supports DLSS, XeSS, and FSR, but it uses Unreal Engine's Temporal Super Resolution (TSR) by default.
At the Low preset, TSR is set at 50% upscaling, dropping by 10% every level until it reaches Ultra, which uses 10% upscaling.
It's the Ultra setting that gets most attention. Requiring the full 24GB of Nvidia's and AMD's previous generation flagships just to reach 30 fps in 4K seems like a case of poor optimization, even if it is at ultra settings. Doubly so when you consider that this is with upscaling enabled.
Assassin's Creed Shadows is another game with upscaling as a standard requirement in its PC specs. But its Extended Ray Tracing level, which asks for an RTX 4090 and an Intel i7-13700K, offers 60 fps at 4K and the full suite of ray tracing effects.