Nvidia GPUs are broken in one of the most demanding new PC games, says developer

Nvidia users have been on a roller coaster the past few months with driver updates and game compatibility, and it doesn't look like that's stopping any time soon. On Monday, developer Rogue Factor released a demo for the upcoming open-world action game Hell is Us, which is built using Unreal Engine 5. Mere hours after the demo went live, the developer posted an update on Steam warning users of Nvidia RTX 40-series and RTX 50-series GPUs that they may encounter a crash when trying to start the game, and urging these users to "reduce your graphics settings" before loading into the game.

Hell is Us demo crashing on Nvidia GPUs

We've heard this one before

Rogue Factor says it's working on a patch for the Hell is Us demo, and given that the game isn't set to release until September 4, there's plenty of time to fix issues before the official launch. What's interesting is the developer's temporary workaround. Before loading into the game, Rogue Factor tells users to reduce their graphics settings and turn off all the upscaling and frame generation options in the game. Once you're actually in control of your character, Rogue Factor says you can freely tweak the graphics settings without any fear of crashing; something I can confirm from my own time with the demo.

It hearkens back to a couple of months ago, when the developers of InZoi and The First Berserker: Khazan told Nvidia users to roll back their driver installs if they experience performance issues. For the past several months, since the introduction of RTX 50-series GPUs, Nvidia has had a tough time getting its drivers under control. A series of unresolved bugs eventually led to an investigation by Gamer's Nexus, who said Nvidia's recent driver releases were "absolutely abhorrent."

There's a good chance the issue in Hell is Us is related to the driver, though the developer hasn't confirmed that detail. Tentatively, the developer says the crashing issue only impacts RTX 40-series and RTX 50-series GPUs, and it's somehow related to DLSS. We've seen previous examples of Nvidia's DLSS tech crashing games over the past few months of driver issues. It's hard to say for sure what's going on, but it's possible the DLSS-related crashes we've seen are related to the new DLSS overrides in the Nvidia app, which allow you to inject the new Transformer model and Multi-Frame Generation (MFG) into games that don't natively support them.

Although there's a workaround, you'll likely need to resort to upscaling and frame generation to get a playable frame rate in Hell is Us. As you can see from the system requirements above, the developer calls for an RTX 4090 to get 4K at 30 frames per second (fps), and that's with upscaling enabled. To get 60 fps at 1080p, the developer calls for an RTX 2080 Ti, which is steep.