Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival PC Performance Analysis & Tuning Guide – How To Get The Best Experience On PC

Unreal Engine 5 games have acquired something of a reputation for demanding hardware and inconsistent frame pacing, even when their visuals don't necessarily justify the performance cost. Thankfully, Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival is a considerably more encouraging example. Saber Interactive's survival horror game looks decent, performs relatively well on both our desktop and laptop test systems, and suffers from surprisingly few shader compilation stutters or serious traversal hitches.

There are some limitations, however. Although it makes use of several of Unreal Engine 5's modern rendering features, Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival is far from the engine's most visually ambitious showcase. More importantly, most of its graphics settings offer very little scalability, with comparatively minor differences in both visual quality and performance between their highest and lowest values. That leaves temporal upscaling as the most effective way of improving performance on less powerful GPUs.

Nevertheless, we were able to increase average performance by approximately 33% on our i7-12700H + RTX 4060 laptop test system by moving from the Epic preset to our optimized configuration, with only relatively modest visual compromises.

In this guide, we'll examine the game's technical presentation and PC features, analyze CPU performance, look at the visual and performance impact of every relevant graphics setting, and establish an optimized configuration for the best overall experience.

Gameplay And Technical Overview Of Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival

Released on October 8, 2026, Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival is a first-person action-survival horror game set in the disturbing universe of Clive Barker's Hellraiser. Players assume the role of Aidan, who must harness the powers of the Genesis Configuration puzzle box in an attempt to rescue his girlfriend, Sunny, from the Labyrinth. Along the way, he'll confront cultists, grotesque enemies, and the infamous Cenobites, including Pinhead.

From a technical standpoint, the game runs on Unreal Engine 5.6.1.0, making use of Nanite Virtualized Geometry, software-based Lumen diffuse Global Illumination and specular reflections, and Virtual Shadow Maps (VSM). This is a reasonably modern rendering pipeline, although the software Lumen implementation and the game's comparatively contained environments are less demanding than the more advanced hardware ray tracing configurations we've seen in other recent UE5 releases.

Visually, Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival makes a respectable impression. Its dark environments, atmospheric lighting, and grotesque art direction suit the source material very well. Still, environmental detail and the overall sophistication of the rendering aren't quite at the level of the best-looking Unreal Engine 5 games. Fortunately, that more conservative approach appears to have benefited performance considerably.

The graphics menu is decent but fairly unremarkable. It provides descriptions for individual options, but there's no live graphical preview, built-in performance monitoring, or useful information about system memory and VRAM consumption. A Sharpness slider runs from 0% to 100%, while Motion Blur is the only individual post-processing effect that can be switched on or off independently.

Unfortunately, High Dynamic Range (HDR) isn't supported. There is a High Contrast Mode that can make the SDR presentation more striking, but it isn't a replacement for proper HDR output.

Shader Compilation, Traversal Stutters, And General Performance Impressions

One of the most welcome aspects of Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival is its shader compilation behavior. The game performs a fairly thorough Pipeline State Object (PSO)/shader compilation step, which seems to cover enough of the required shader permutations to keep shader compilation stutter to a minimum during actual gameplay.

Traversal hitches are also relatively uncommon, particularly on our desktop system. We occasionally noticed frame time spikes when moving between environments, but they were generally mild and infrequent rather than the repeated, severe interruptions that have plagued several other recent UE5 games. The game's more limited scope may be helping here, although we can't establish that as the definitive cause.

The experience was somewhat less consistent on our laptop. Traversal hitches were noticeably more pronounced there, despite both systems using PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs. The desktop's considerably faster CPU and system memory are plausible contributing factors, though these tests don't isolate the exact cause. Even so, the overall PC experience remains relatively smooth.

System RAM and GPU VRAM demands were generally manageable, although texture quality still needs to be matched to the graphics card's memory capacity, as we'll discuss later.

Temporal Upscaling, Frame Generation, And Latency Reduction

Fortunately, the game offers a comprehensive selection of Temporal Anti-Aliasing and Upscaling (TAAU) technologies. These include Unreal Engine 5's Temporal Super Resolution (TSR), NVIDIA DLSS Super Resolution, AMD FSR Upscaling, and Intel XeSS Super Resolution.

TSR includes a resolution scale slider ranging from 35% to 100%. This is particularly useful because the game's limited graphics settings scalability makes reducing the internal rendering resolution one of the most effective ways to gain performance.

Our recommendations are straightforward:

• NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPUs: DLSS Super Resolution.
• AMD Radeon RX 7000/9000 Series GPUs: FSR Upscaling, preferably the newer ML-based FSR 4.1 implementation when available in the installed game/driver configuration.
• Intel Arc GPUs: XeSS Super Resolution.
• Other compatible GPUs: Unreal Engine 5 TSR.

Quality mode is a good starting point at 1080p and 1440p, while Balanced or Performance can be worthwhile at 4K or when additional GPU headroom is necessary. As usual, the lower the internal resolution, the more likely you'll be to notice a loss of fine detail, temporal stability, or clarity.

Frame generation support is considerably less comprehensive. DLSS Frame Generation is the only FG technology integrated into the game, with NVIDIA App overrides allowing compatible RTX GPUs to access higher Multi Frame Generation factors, including Dynamic Frame Generation up to 6X on RTX 50 Series GPUs. AMD FSR Frame Generation and Intel XeSS Frame Generation are both missing, although third-party solutions such as OptiScaler may provide unofficial alternatives with their own compatibility caveats.

NVIDIA Reflex Low Latency is supported, but frustratingly, it cannot be toggled independently of DLSS Frame Generation. There's also no native AMD Anti-Lag 2 or Intel Xe Low Latency support. We'd like to see the developers address these omissions in future updates.

Frame generation can improve displayed smoothness, but it doesn't accelerate the underlying game simulation or eliminate CPU-related hitches. We would therefore focus on obtaining a reasonably high and consistent base frame rate with native rendering or temporal upscaling before enabling it, particularly if latency and image stability are priorities.

Official PC System Requirements

According to the game's Steam store page, the official minimum and recommended specifications are as follows:

Component	Minimum	Recommended
Operating System	Windows 10 64-bit, version 22H2 or newer	Windows 10 64-bit, version 22H2 or newer
CPU	Intel Core i5-8400 / AMD Ryzen 5 1500X	Intel Core i5-12400F / AMD Ryzen 5 5600X
RAM	8 GB	16 GB
GPU	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 / AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 8 GB	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 / AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT
Storage	80 GB available	80 GB available
Additional Notes	SSD recommended	SSD recommended

These requirements are comparatively reasonable for a modern Unreal Engine 5 game. The minimum CPUs are several generations old, and even the recommended tier lists relatively modest six-core processors alongside midrange GPUs. The 8 GB minimum RAM requirement is also quite low by current AAA standards, although we'd strongly favor the recommended 16 GB for a modern gaming system.

Unfortunately, Saber Interactive doesn't specify the target resolution, frame rate, graphics preset, or upscaling mode for either configuration. We therefore can't treat the recommended GPUs as a guarantee of 1080p/60 FPS at Epic, for example.

The suggested SSD is also worth taking seriously. Although our testing revealed relatively few traversal hitches, asset streaming is still part of the Unreal Engine 5 workload, and slower storage is unlikely to improve frame time consistency.

Test Systems And Methodology

We used two PC configurations for our performance analysis, with each handling a different part of the testing:

Component	Desktop: Individual Graphics Settings Testing	Laptop: CPU And Optimized Graphics Settings Testing
CPU	Intel Core i7-14700K	Intel Core i7-12700H
GPU	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 24 GB	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop GPU 8 GB
RAM	32 GB DDR5-7000	16 GB DDR4-3200
Storage	2 TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD	1 TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD
Operating System	Windows 11 26H2	Windows 11 26H2

For individual graphics settings comparisons, we used the desktop system at 2560 × 1440 (1440p) under GPU-limited conditions. Unreal Engine 5's TSR was set to 100% resolution scale, with the Epic preset serving as our baseline. We changed one relevant option at a time to assess its visual and performance characteristics.

Sharpness was set to 0%, and Motion Blur was disabled throughout the comparisons so that neither option would obscure the differences between settings.

CPU-focused testing was conducted on the laptop in a demanding scene with numerous environmental assets, props, and geometric details. We also used the laptop for our final Epic-versus-optimized comparison, this time at 1920 × 1080 (1080p) with DLSS Super Resolution Quality mode, Preset K. Performance was recorded using CapFrameX.

CPU Performance Testing

Despite its use of Unreal Engine 5's modern rendering features, Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival doesn't appear particularly demanding on the CPU.

For our CPU-focused benchmark, we selected a relatively complex environment containing plenty of geometry, props, and environmental detail, then recorded performance on our Core i7-12700H and RTX 4060 laptop test system.

The full CapFrameX results were as follows:

Or, in tabular form for the most important metrics:

Metric	Result
Average FPS	126.8
1% Low FPS	89.5
0.1% Low FPS	78.3
Adaptive Standard Deviation	13

Even this relatively modest laptop CPU managed an average frame rate well above 100 FPS, while 1% lows remained close to 90 FPS and 0.1% lows stayed above 75 FPS. The frame time graph was also very stable, with only a few lurches above the 10 millisecond mark.

These are encouraging results. The benchmark suggests that a reasonably capable modern processor should have little trouble delivering high average frame rates in most situations, even with a substantial amount of environmental detail on screen.

However, the captured run doesn't tell the whole story. Traversal stutters were considerably more noticeable on the laptop than on our faster desktop system, and some were inconsistent enough that they didn't recur with the same severity between runs. Since both systems use PCIe 4.0 SSDs, the desktop's superior CPU and memory performance may be helping with streaming and asset processing, although a controlled platform comparison would be needed to confirm that.

In short, general CPU throughput is good, but that doesn't mean every moment of gameplay will be perfectly free of frame time spikes, especially on less powerful systems.

A Deep Dive Into Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival's Graphics Settings

Before getting into the individual options, there's an important observation worth emphasizing: most graphics settings have surprisingly little effect on GPU-limited performance or overall image quality.

This limits the game's ability to scale both upward and downward. Owners of powerful GPUs don't gain a particularly dramatic visual upgrade by selecting Epic across the board, while owners of weaker GPUs can't recover enormous amounts of performance simply by lowering everything to Low.

There are a few worthwhile exceptions, particularly Anti-Aliasing, Global Illumination, Reflection Quality, and Shadow Quality. Our recommendations focus on those useful adjustments while keeping settings with little measurable impact at their highest values.

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With that said, let's look at how each relevant graphics setting scales in Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival.

View Distance

View Distance controls how far environmental objects and other scene details remain visible. Ordinarily, reducing it can limit the amount of geometry the game needs to render, sometimes delivering meaningful improvements in open environments.

However, lowering View Distance in Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival produced practically no performance benefit in our GPU-limited tests. Given the limited gains and the potential loss of distant environmental detail, there's little reason to move away from Epic.

Recommendation: Epic

Anti-Aliasing

Anti-Aliasing adjusts the quality of Unreal Engine 5's TSR. Higher settings can improve the stability and smoothness of edges, particularly around thin geometry and fine detail, but they also increase the cost of the temporal reconstruction process.

Medium provided the best visuals-to-performance balance during our testing. Higher values offered diminishing returns, while lowering the setting further was less attractive from an image-quality standpoint.

Bear in mind that this option primarily concerns TSR. If you're using DLSS Super Resolution, FSR Upscaling, or XeSS Super Resolution instead, then their respective upscaling/native modes will be the more relevant controls.

Recommendation: Medium when using TSR

Shadow Quality

Shadow Quality adjusts the fidelity of the game's Virtual Shadow Maps, affecting the definition and consistency of shadows cast by characters, objects, and environmental geometry.

Medium offered the best compromise in our comparisons. It retained a convincing overall shadow presentation while avoiding some of the unnecessary GPU cost associated with High and Epic. Reducing Shadow Quality further wasn't worthwhile for our optimized configuration.

Recommendation: Medium

Texture Quality

Texture Quality controls the level of detail in the game's textures. Unlike some rendering options, it should primarily be adjusted according to available VRAM, rather than the GPU's raw computational performance.

At 1440p, our testing indicated a video-memory budget of approximately 10 GB or more for Medium, High, and Epic textures, while Low required roughly 8 GB. This is one of the few areas where the game's relatively modest overall hardware demands need a qualification: an 8 GB GPU may not be comfortable with the higher texture presets at 1440p, even if its processing performance is sufficient.

Running out of VRAM can cause much more severe problems than a small reduction in average FPS, including texture streaming issues and abrupt frame time spikes. For that reason, we'd use Low at 1440p on 8 GB graphics cards and increase texture quality only when memory headroom allows. At lower resolutions, it's worth checking actual VRAM usage before settling on a preset.

Recommendation: Highest level that fits your VRAM budget; generally Low for 8 GB GPUs at 1440p, Medium–Epic with approximately 10 GB or more available

Post-Processing

Post-Processing controls the quality of effects such as bloom, color correction, depth of field, and other image-processing passes that contribute to the game's overall presentation.

Interestingly, changing this setting had very little effect on performance in our testing. Its visual impact is also somewhat subjective, particularly in a horror game where the atmosphere depends heavily on the chosen post-processing treatment.

We'd therefore leave it to personal preference rather than lower it solely in pursuit of additional FPS. Motion Blur can be toggled separately; we kept it disabled for clearer image comparisons and generally prefer that presentation during gameplay.

Recommendation: Personal preference; Motion Blur Off if you prefer a clearer image

Global Illumination

Global Illumination is among the more consequential settings. It governs the quality and coverage of indirect light, including the way light bounces around the environment and illuminates surfaces outside direct light sources. It also influences ambient occlusion and the perception of depth in the game's dark interiors.

All quality levels appear to retain software-based Lumen diffuse GI, with higher settings primarily improving the quality of the result through additional sampling and related quality adjustments.

Epic carries a noticeable performance penalty compared with High, but the visual improvement is difficult to justify. Better still, High performed similarly to Medium and Low in our tests while maintaining superior indirect-lighting coverage.

This makes High one of the easiest recommendations in the entire graphics menu.

Recommendation: High

Reflection Quality

Reflection Quality controls the resolution and fidelity of reflections on applicable surfaces, including the contribution from Unreal Engine 5's software Lumen reflections.

High and Epic both enable software Lumen Signed Distance Field (SDF)-based specular reflections. This is particularly relevant because reducing the setting below High can change more than the quality of the reflections themselves; it can also remove the more advanced reflection path.

Fortunately, High retains the benefits of software Lumen specular reflections while avoiding the higher GPU cost of Epic. The resulting visual compromise is modest enough that we'd have no hesitation recommending it for most systems.

Recommendation: High

Effects

Effects determines the quality of various visual effects, including the kind of particles and environmental effects that contribute to the game's grotesque horror presentation.

High looks almost identical to Epic during typical gameplay but runs better in our comparisons. Reducing it below High, on the other hand, failed to deliver a meaningful additional performance improvement.

As such, High represents another straightforward optimization.

Recommendation: High

Foliage Quality

Foliage Quality adjusts the rendering quality of vegetation and related environmental details.

Some Unreal Engine 5 games exhibit considerable performance differences when lowering foliage quality, but that wasn't the case here, which is most likely due to the limited amount of foliage in the tested scene. Moving below Epic produced little measurable GPU performance improvement in our testing.

We'd simply leave it at its highest value.

Recommendation: Epic

Shading Quality

Shading Quality controls aspects of the rendering of surface shading, lighting, shadows, and reflections.

Despite its fairly broad description, reducing this setting below Epic didn't deliver any additional performance worth mentioning on our test system. As with View Distance and Foliage Quality, sacrificing visual quality for an essentially negligible gain makes little sense.

Recommendation: Epic

Optimized Graphics Settings For Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival

Based on our comparisons, we've established the following optimized configuration. It preserves most of the game's presentation while reducing the cost of a handful of unnecessarily expensive settings.

Graphics Setting	Optimized Value
View Distance	Epic
Anti-Aliasing	Medium (TSR)
Shadow Quality	Medium
Texture Quality	VRAM-dependent; Low on 8 GB cards at 1440p, higher settings with sufficient memory
Post-Processing	Personal preference
Global Illumination	High
Reflection Quality	High
Effects	High
Foliage Quality	Epic
Shading Quality	Epic

The most worthwhile adjustments are reducing Shadow Quality to Medium, as well as using High for Global Illumination, Reflection Quality, and Effects. Anti-Aliasing at Medium is also a sensible choice for users relying on TSR.

By contrast, View Distance, Foliage Quality, and Shading Quality can remain at Epic because lowering them provides little to no measurable benefit. Post-Processing is best adjusted according to taste rather than performance, while Texture Quality should be selected with VRAM capacity in mind.

If you still need higher frame rates after applying these settings, then temporal upscaling will generally deliver a more substantial improvement than aggressively lowering the remaining options. We'd start with DLSS Super Resolution, FSR Upscaling, or XeSS Super Resolution Quality mode on supported hardware and reduce the internal resolution only as necessary.

Epic Preset Vs Optimized Graphics Settings – Performance Comparison

To measure the benefit of our optimized configuration, we compared it against the maximum Epic preset on our Core i7-12700H and RTX 4060 laptop at 1080p with DLSS Super Resolution Quality mode (Preset K), in the following scene:

The results were as follows:

Performance Metric	Epic Preset	Optimized Settings	Improvement
Average FPS	86	114	+33%
1% Low FPS	45	48	+7%

The improvement in average frame rate is substantial. Our optimized configuration delivered 28 additional FPS, moving from 86 FPS on the Epic preset to 114 FPS with surprisingly little visual degradation. For an 8 GB RTX 4060 laptop, this is a worthwhile improvement that makes it easier to take advantage of a high-refresh-rate display.

The story is less impressive when looking at 1% lows. They improved by only 3 FPS, from 45 to 48 FPS, suggesting that the worst frame time fluctuations were not primarily caused by the graphics options we reduced. That result is consistent with our separate observations of traversal-related hitches on the laptop, although it doesn't establish their precise cause.

We deliberately excluded 0.1% lows from this comparison because the severity and frequency of traversal hitches varied too much between benchmark runs for those figures to provide a reliable like-for-like comparison.

Overall, the results reinforce our findings from the individual settings tests: sensible adjustments can improve average GPU performance substantially, but reducing graphics quality doesn't necessarily solve occasional streaming or CPU-side frame time spikes.

Final Words

Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival is one of the more pleasant Unreal Engine 5 surprises we've tested recently from a performance standpoint. The game looks reasonably good, doesn't demand an exceptionally powerful CPU, and its thorough PSO compilation process keeps shader compilation stutter largely under control. Traversal hitches still occur, especially on our laptop, but they are generally less intrusive than in several more technically ambitious UE5 releases.

Its biggest weakness is graphics scalability. Most settings offer such small visual and performance differences that there's little incentive to lower them, and the game doesn't push visual fidelity far enough to justify consistently high GPU costs either.

There are also a few disappointing PC feature omissions. Native HDR is absent, NVIDIA Reflex Low Latency can't be enabled independently of DLSS Frame Generation, and AMD/Intel players don't have integrated frame generation or their respective latency reduction technologies. We'd certainly welcome improvements on those fronts.

Still, with our optimized settings providing 33% higher average performance on the RTX 4060 laptop while retaining most of the Epic preset's visual quality, Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival offers a relatively smooth and enjoyable PC experience without requiring cutting-edge hardware. That's a welcome outcome for a modern Unreal Engine 5 horror game.

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