Ahead of Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 Enhanced arriving on Xbox Game Pass next month, developer Ninja Theory has gone into a bit more detail on how it's managed to get the game running at 60FPS on Xbox Series X - which sounds like no small feat for a game of this nature.
We'll drop the team's video explainer on this down below, where Ninja Theory reps discuss the work that's gone into enhancing Hellblade 2. Xbox Series S misses out on this one of course, but Series X and the newly-relevant PS5 consoles are all getting 60FPS options next month.
Subscribe to Pure Xbox on YouTube30k
In the above clip, Ninja Theory mentions that it already had performance overhead with the 30FPS mode, meaning that the game could always run faster if the frame rate cap was removed. However, that wouldn't go all the way up to 60FPS consistently, so the team had to put lots of work in to make sure a rock-solid 60FPS is a reality for folks using the mode in Hellblade 2: Enhanced.
"From the outset, we were pretty set on not removing any features at all for the performance mode version of the game. Rather, we made a series of targeted optimizations as well as performance mode-specific settings.
For the original release of Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2, we optimized to the 30Hz target, and then actually optimized a bit further than that to give ourselves a bit of headroom for a smoother frame rate.
So that meant that we had a bit of spare CPU headroom basically, where if we were to scale the graphics settings, you get some additional frame rate by default - but it wasn't quite enough to get us all the way to 60FPS."
Given that the visual side of things was what we were most impressed with during our initial Hellblade 2 review, we're curious to see how this all plays out. Will the 60FPS mode remain visually impressive while alleviating some of our concerns with "clunky combat"? Hopefully it does - we're definitely up for trying it out when Hellblade 2: Enhanced lands for Xbox Game Pass on August 12.