Hellraiser: Revival: Best PC Settings and Performance Guide

Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival launched on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S and Switch 2 on October 8, and the PC version ships with a fuller graphics menu than most survival horror games bother with. If you installed it on launch day and haven't touched a slider since, or Update 1.1's new GPU driver warning caught you off guard, here's what the settings actually do and how to set them up properly.

01What Hellraiser: Revival Needs From Your PC

Hellraiser: Revival's Steam page lists a 64-bit Windows 10 (22H2 or later) minimum, an AMD Ryzen 5 1500X or Intel Core i5-8400, 8 GB of RAM, and a Radeon RX Vega 64 or GeForce GTX 1660. The recommended tier steps up to a Ryzen 5 5600X or Core i5-12400F, 16 GB of RAM, and a Radeon RX 6600 XT or RTX 3060. Both tiers ask for 80 GB of free space, and Valve's own listing recommends an SSD rather than treating it as optional.

That storage note matters more than it looks. The game streams Unreal Engine lighting and geometry as you move through the Labyrinth's tighter corridors, and a nearly-full or heavily fragmented mechanical drive is a common cause of the texture pop-in that reviewers flagged at launch, independent of your GPU tier. If you're installing fresh, put it on your fastest drive.

On the console side, the game is rated M for Mature 17+ by the ESRB for blood and gore, intense violence, nudity, strong language, strong sexual content and drug use, with no content cut to secure that rating — worth knowing if you're setting up parental controls on a shared PC rather than just tuning frame rate.

02Upscaling, Frame Generation and the Graphics Menu

The PC build's upscaler support is broader than the store page lets on. Between Unreal Engine's own TSR, Nvidia DLSS, AMD FSR and Intel XeSS, you get a scaler option regardless of which GPU vendor you're running, each with its own render-scale slider. As a starting point: DLSS on GeForce RTX cards, XeSS on Arc, and TSR or FSR on anything else, set to Quality at 1080p or 1440p and stepped down to Balanced or Performance if you're targeting 4K.

Frame generation is more limited than in most recent releases. Nvidia Reflex is available, but PC hardware outlets that tested the build at launch found it only toggles on alongside DLSS Frame Generation rather than as a standalone latency reducer, and neither FSR nor XeSS frame generation is offered at all. If your base frame rate is already sitting close to 60 before you enable anything, DLSS Frame Generation is worth testing; if you're well under that, fix your base rate with the upscaler and settings below first, since generated frames look worse the lower your starting rate is.

Beyond the upscaler, the menu breaks out View Distance, Shadows, Textures, Global Illumination and Reflections as separate sliders, each with an on-screen description of what it costs. There's no live performance preview or VRAM estimate next to any of them, so changes are a save-and-reload-the-area proposition rather than something you can judge instantly. HDR isn't supported on PC at all — if your monitor can do it, the in-game picture settings won't unlock it, and you're working in SDR regardless of your display.

03Best Settings for 1080p, 1440p and 4K

The settings most worth lowering first are Global Illumination and Reflections, since both tie into the real-time lighting that drives most of the game's GPU cost in Pinhead's domain and the Cenobite-infested stretches of the Labyrinth. Shadows is the next biggest saving after that. View Distance has the smallest impact of the five in practice, since large sections of the campaign play out in corridors and rooms rather than open outdoor space, so it's a low-priority slider unless you're still short on frame rate after everything else.

Textures is worth leaving closer to its default even on weaker hardware. It mostly determines how much VRAM the game reserves rather than how much work your GPU does per frame, so dropping it saves little unless you're actually running out of video memory and seeing stutter or texture swapping because of it. If you're on an 8 GB card, that's the one exception — bring Textures down a notch before touching the others.

At 1080p or 1440p on a recommended-spec card, Quality-mode upscaling plus the graphics presets around Medium-High should comfortably clear 60 FPS outside of the heaviest Cenobite set-pieces. At 4K, drop the upscaler to Balanced or Performance before you touch anything else; the resolution bump costs far more than any individual graphics slider, and 4K without upscaling assistance is a rough ask even for cards above the recommended tier.

04Update 1.1: What Changed Since Launch

Saber Interactive shipped Update 1.1 for the PC version on October 15, a week after launch, with a console patch following separately. The headline PC-specific change is a new startup notice that warns you when your GPU driver is out of date — if you see it, update through Nvidia, AMD or Intel's own driver tool before reporting a crash, since several of the stability issues players ran into during launch week traced back to outdated drivers rather than the game itself.

The rest of 1.1 is mostly progression and softlock fixes rather than settings changes: a fix for falling through the floor after the sewer ladder climb, a collision fix for finishing Charlotte's chase sequence, a fix for a slow level-load after Sunny's pillar teleport that could drop you out of the world in the Labyrinth, a fix for Charlotte getting stuck on a rock ledge mid-boss-fight, and a fix for the Flooded Room's lever not appearing if you saved mid-puzzle. On the visual side, it reduces geometry and lighting pop-in when backtracking through the Dungeon, the Chatterer chase sequence and one stairwell area, which is the closest thing to a performance-adjacent fix in this patch.

None of this changes which graphics settings exist or what they're called, so if you dialled in a configuration before October 15, it should still apply cleanly after updating — you're not starting over.

05Step-by-Step: Dialing In Your Settings

If you'd rather follow a fixed sequence than tune everything by feel, this is the order that gets you to a stable frame rate with the least amount of re-testing.

Dialing In Your Settings

1. 1Update 1.1 added a startup warning for outdated GPU drivers. Update yours through Nvidia, AMD or Intel's own tool before troubleshooting anything else — several launch-week stability reports traced back to this rather than the game.2 min
2. 2Set your upscaler — DLSS on GeForce, XeSS on Arc, FSR or TSR otherwise — to Quality at 1080p/1440p or Balanced at 4K, then play one combat-heavy area to get a feel for your base frame rate before adjusting anything else.3 min
3. 3These two sliders carry the most GPU cost in the Labyrinth's lit areas. Drop them one notch at a time and recheck the same area rather than changing every setting at once.2 min
4. 4Shadows is the next-biggest saving after lighting; View Distance matters far less in a game built around corridors and interiors, so leave it for last.1 min
5. 5Textures mostly affects memory use rather than frame rate. Only lower it if you're on an 8 GB card and seeing stutter that looks like texture swapping.1 min
6. 6Re-check your settings in both a shadow-heavy interior and an outdoor area, since the two stress different sliders — a configuration that looks smooth in one can still stutter in the other.2 min

06Default Controls and Accessibility

Out of the box, Hellraiser: Revival runs on a fairly standard first-person scheme: WASD to move, left click to attack, right click to aim and E to use the Genesis Configuration's powers. Inventory management gets its own small set of bindings — Delete to unequip an item, Ctrl to auto-sort your storage, G to transfer an item, and Q to rotate it while placing. We couldn't confirm from the options menu itself how much of that scheme is rebindable beyond the defaults, so if you're coming from a different shooter's layout, check the keybind list before you commit to a long play session rather than assuming everything maps the way you'd expect.

There's no native field-of-view slider in the settings menu as of Update 1.1 — what you see at a given resolution and aspect ratio is fixed. The picture menu does include a High Contrast mode, which is the closest thing to an HDR substitute given the PC version's lack of real HDR output. It's worth trying if you're struggling to pick out enemies in the Labyrinth's darker stretches, rather than just cranking in-game brightness past where the scene actually looks right. The game has full controller support on PC, including separate DualSense and DualShock button prompts, alongside the usual mouse-and-keyboard setup.

Steam's own Deck compatibility rating for Hellraiser: Revival sits at Playable rather than Verified as of late October, meaning Valve hasn't certified an out-of-the-box default profile — treat any specific low-power settings you see elsewhere as unconfirmed until Valve updates that rating, and expect to set your own upscaler and preset by hand on a Deck or similar handheld rather than relying on a built-in profile.

If you're still getting crashes after installing Update 1.1 and confirming your GPU driver is current, the most common remaining report is stutter tied to a nearly-full or non-SSD drive rather than the graphics settings themselves — worth ruling out before you keep lowering sliders that aren't actually your bottleneck.

Saber Interactive's Accolades Trailer, posted October 22, rounds up review coverage since the game's October 8 PC launch.