High On Life

High On Life is the rare comedy shooter that actually landed its jokes and, almost as a side effect, became a useful hardware reference point. Squanch Games built its bounty-hunting FPS on Unreal Engine 4 and shipped it in December 2022, and it has been a steady presence in our benchmark library ever since because it sits in a genuinely informative spot: modern enough to stress mid-range hardware at higher resolutions, well-behaved enough that the numbers mean something. Across 3,718 measured CPU and GPU combinations in our database, the average system records 87 FPS at 1080p Ultra, 62 FPS at 1440p Ultra, and 38 FPS at 4K Ultra. The fastest combinations reach 598 FPS at 1080p Low, while the slowest rigs crawl at 23 FPS at 1080p Ultra. That spread is wide, but the shape of it tells a clear story: this is a GPU-first game with a manageable CPU appetite, and it scales predictably with the money you spend on your graphics card.

Unreal Engine 4 doing what Unreal Engine 4 does

High On Life's performance profile is textbook late-cycle UE4. The game is primarily GPU-bound at any resolution above 1080p Low, which is exactly what you want from a single-player shooter: your graphics card determines your frame rate, and the processor mostly stays out of the way. The visual load comes from dense alien environments, heavy post-processing, volumetric effects, and large texture sets for the game's gross, colorful biomes. Blim City and the denser combat arenas push the most geometry and shader work, and that is where frame rates dip below the averages on borderline hardware.

The CPU side is modest by modern standards. The game is single-player with scripted encounters rather than systemic simulation, so it never asks the processor to track hundreds of entities the way a survival game or MMO does. A modern 6-core CPU is comfortably sufficient, and even older quad-cores with decent clocks keep up at 1080p. Where the CPU does matter is frame-time consistency: UE4 titles of this era are prone to traversal stutter as new areas stream in, and High On Life is no exception. A weak processor combined with a slow drive produces hitches when crossing into new zones, and no graphics setting fixes that.

Memory and storage deserve a mention because UE4 streaming leans on both. 16 GB of RAM is the comfortable target, and dual-channel DDR5 (or at least properly configured dual-channel DDR4) keeps minimum frame rates steadier than a single stick ever will. The game benefits visibly from an NVMe SSD: load times shrink, texture pop-in recedes, and the traversal hitches soften. It runs from a hard drive if you insist, but this is a 50 GB streaming world and it was designed around fast storage.

1080p: where almost any gaming PC is welcome

At 1920x1080 with Ultra settings, the 87 FPS database average means the typical gaming PC from the last several years plays High On Life smoothly at high refresh. This is the game's home turf. A mid-range build, something like a current 6-core CPU paired with a mainstream GPU, sits right around or above that average and delivers the game as intended: fluid, colorful, and responsive.

The percentiles add useful context. The 10th percentile at 1080p Ultra is 38 FPS, representing the weaker end of tested hardware, older budget cards and aging quad-cores. The 90th percentile is 136 FPS, which is upper-mid-range territory pushing into high-refresh monitor use. And the floor of 23 FPS at 1080p Ultra is the reminder that truly old or underpowered systems will not enjoy maxed settings here; if your machine is from the GTX 960 era, plan on Low and a resolution scaler.

The ceiling tells the opposite story. At 598 FPS maximum at 1080p Low, flagship hardware barely notices this game at 1080p. If you own a high-end card and a 240Hz monitor, High On Life will feed it at Low to Medium settings without breaking a sweat, and even Ultra on a flagship stays well past refresh rates most people own. The practical takeaway for 1080p players: spend on the GPU first, keep 16 GB of dual-channel memory, and the game simply works.

1440p and 4K: the GPU bill comes due

At 2560x1440 Ultra the average falls to 62 FPS, a drop of roughly 29 percent from 1080p. That is classic GPU-bound scaling, and it means 1440p is where High On Life starts sorting hardware into tiers. The average is still perfectly playable, and a mid-range card from the last two or three generations holds 60 FPS at Ultra or a tuned High. This is the resolution where upscaling becomes genuinely useful rather than optional: the game supports DLSS and FSR on PC, and either one at Quality mode recovers enough frame rate to push a 60 FPS experience toward 90 or beyond with minimal image cost. If you are shopping for the best graphics card for High On Life at 1440p, target something in the current upper-mid-range, and take DLSS or FSR support as a given rather than a bonus.

At 3840x2160 Ultra, the 38 FPS average is the honest answer about 4K in this game: it is heavy. Four times the pixels of 1080p punishes everything below the high-end bracket. The Low preset average at 4K is 77 FPS, which shows how much headroom settings reductions buy at this resolution, and upscaling at 4K is close to mandatory for a fluid experience on anything short of flagship silicon. A tuned mix of High settings with DLSS or FSR at Quality gets strong cards to a locked 60. Native 4K Ultra at high refresh is flagship-only territory, and even there you will want upscaling for the busiest scenes. The good news is that High On Life's painterly, saturated art style tolerates upscaling extremely well; there is little fine geometry or distant detail for the reconstructor to fumble.

Recommended settings: our tested configuration

High On Life's settings menu is conventional UE4, and the gains follow the usual hierarchy. In our data, dropping from Ultra to Low roughly doubles average frame rate at every resolution (87 to 171 FPS at 1080p, 62 to 125 at 1440p, 38 to 77 at 4K), so the presets have real teeth.

For a balanced configuration, start at High rather than Ultra. The visual difference is small in motion and the frame rate recovery is substantial. Shadows and post-processing are the first manual cuts: both are expensive here, and the game's art direction loses almost nothing with shadows at Medium. Effects quality matters during the busier boss fights, when particle counts spike, so Medium there buys stability where it counts. View distance and textures are the settings to keep high if your GPU has 8 GB of VRAM or more, because they define the look of the game and cost comparatively little frame rate on capable cards.

Upscaling is the single highest-value option in the menu. DLSS on Nvidia hardware, FSR on everything else, Quality mode at 1440p or 4K, Balanced at 4K on mid-range cards. There is no competitive argument against upscaling here because there is no competitive mode; this is a single-player comedy, and image quality at Quality preset is excellent. Cap your frame rate a few frames below your monitor's refresh if you see frame-time spikes in Blim City; the cap smooths the streaming hitches that the engine otherwise hands you at random intervals.

What hardware do you need?

Entry level (older quad-core, 8 to 16 GB RAM, GTX 1050 Ti or RX 570 class): Expect 1080p Low around the 30 to 45 FPS band, consistent with the lower end of our measured data and the 38 FPS 10th percentile at Ultra. The game is playable at this tier, but cut shadows and effects, enable FSR at Balanced, and put the game on an SSD. A cheap GPU upgrade transforms this tier more than anything else.

Mid-range (modern 6-core, 16 GB dual-channel, RTX 3060 or RX 6600 XT class): This is the sweet spot the averages describe. 1080p Ultra at 80 to 110 FPS, 1440p at 60 to 80 with light tuning, upscaling available for headroom. If you are planning a gaming PC build with High On Life and similar single-player titles in mind, this tier is the value answer, and it is the cheapest point where the game looks and runs exactly as the developers intended.

High-end (Ryzen 7 or Core i7, 32 GB, RTX 4070 or RX 7800 XT class): 1080p Ultra at 130 to 180 FPS, comfortably inside the upper percentiles of our data, 1440p Ultra at 90 to 120, and 4K at 60 with DLSS or FSR Quality. This tier also pairs naturally with a 144Hz monitor at 1440p, which is arguably the best way to play the game: high enough frame rate for the shooting to feel crisp, high enough resolution for the art to pop.

Flagship (X3D or fastest Intel, RTX 4080 or 4090 class and above): The 598 FPS ceiling at 1080p Low belongs to this bracket, and at 1440p the constraint becomes your monitor rather than the game. At 4K, expect 60 to 100 FPS at Ultra with upscaling, and triple digits with tuning. Buy this tier for 4K native ambitions or a 240Hz monitor at 1440p; anything less and you are overspending for this particular game.

Laptop playability

High On Life is friendlier to gaming laptops than most of the demanding titles in our library, because its CPU demands are modest and its GPU load scales cleanly with settings. A laptop with a mobile RTX 3060 or 4060 and 16 GB of dual-channel memory runs the game at 1080p High to Ultra in the 60 to 90 FPS range, right in line with our mid-range desktop data once power limits are accounted for. The two laptop-specific cautions are memory and cooling. Many thin gaming laptops ship with a single stick of RAM, and going to dual-channel is worth real, measurable minimum frame rate in UE4 streaming scenes; it is the cheapest meaningful upgrade you can make to a budget gaming laptop. Second, this game's longer play sessions in dense areas will find a laptop's thermal limits, so a cap at 60 FPS on battery or on quieter fan profiles keeps frame times steadier than an uncapped, thermal-throttling roller coaster. Integrated graphics and ultrabooks are not viable here; even at Low with aggressive FSR, the game wants a discrete GPU.

Streaming and content creation

A single-player comedy shooter is stream-friendly by nature: no anti-cheat to fight with capture software, no competitive frame-rate demands, and an audience that is watching for the jokes as much as the gameplay. The technical setup follows standard practice. Use a hardware encoder, NVENC on Nvidia cards or AMF on AMD, rather than CPU x264 encoding. The game does not heavily load the CPU, so x264 at a fast preset is workable if you have cores to spare, but NVENC at 1080p60 costs essentially nothing in frame rate and frees the processor entirely. That said, High On Life is a strong x264 candidate if you are building a streaming setup around quality per bit: because the CPU has headroom here, a medium or even slow preset is realistic on an 8-core chip, and the game's flat, saturated color fields encode beautifully.

For video creators, the game's cutscene-heavy structure means long capture sessions, so verify your storage headroom before recording 4K footage. The same machine class that runs the game at 1440p Ultra doubles as a competent video editing workstation for cutting that footage, since neither the game nor a 1080p timeline stresses the CPU the way simulation titles do.

Common problems and fixes

Hitching when entering new areas: traversal stutter from UE4 asset streaming. Move the game to an NVMe SSD, make sure you have 16 GB of RAM in dual-channel, and cap the frame rate. The hitches shrink noticeably on fast storage.

Frame rate much lower than the database average: check what is rendering behind the game. The averages here come from clean systems; overlays, browser video, and background capture tools each skim GPU time. Also verify XMP or EXPO is enabled, because single-channel or JEDEC-speed memory costs real performance in this engine.

Blurry image after enabling upscaling: the upscaler is set below Quality, or the render scale slider is stacked underneath it. Use DLSS or FSR at Quality and leave render scale at 100.

Stutter in Blim City but smooth combat elsewhere: Blim City is the densest streaming area in the game and the worst case for slow drives and weak CPUs. It is also brief; if the rest of the game runs well, this is the engine, not your build.

Crashes on older drivers: UE4 titles of this vintage are sensitive to ancient GPU drivers, especially with upscaling enabled. Update to a current driver before blaming the hardware.

Upgrade priorities

High On Life has a conventional, sensible upgrade order, which is refreshing. First, the graphics card: at every resolution the data shows the GPU sets the frame rate, so a CPU upgrade is almost never the right first move for this game unless your processor is genuinely ancient. Second, memory and storage as a pair: 16 GB of dual-channel RAM and an NVMe SSD eliminate the streaming stutter that graphics settings cannot touch, and both are cheap. Third, the monitor: the game at 1440p 144Hz is a different experience from 60Hz, and mid-range hardware already drives it there, so display upgrades return more enjoyment here than another GPU tier. The processor comes last. A modern 6-core is all the game ever asks for, and spending past that buys nothing the benchmarks can show.

Frequently asked questions

Q: Is High On Life CPU or GPU intensive?

A: GPU intensive, clearly. Our scaling data, 87 FPS at 1080p Ultra down to 38 at 4K Ultra, is the signature of a GPU-bound game. Any modern 6-core CPU is enough; put your budget into the graphics card.

Q: What is a good FPS for High On Life?

A: The 1080p Ultra average across 3,718 tested combinations is 87 FPS, so anything in the 60 to 100 range at your resolution's high settings means your PC is doing its job. For a single-player shooter, a locked 60 at 1440p is a great experience.

Q: Can I play High On Life on a low-end PC?

A: Yes, with compromises. The weakest systems in our data still manage 23 FPS at 1080p Ultra and considerably more at Low. Use the Low preset, FSR at Balanced, and an SSD, and older budget hardware gets through the campaign.

Q: Does High On Life support DLSS or FSR?

A: Yes, both are available on PC in current builds. Upscaling is the single most effective performance option in the game, especially at 1440p and 4K, where Quality mode recovers a large chunk of frame rate for minimal image cost.

Q: How much RAM does High On Life need?

A: 16 GB in dual-channel is the right target. The game runs on 8 GB but streams worse and stutters more. Dual-channel configuration matters as much as capacity here; two 8 GB sticks beat one 16 GB stick every time.

Q: Is High On Life well optimized?

A: Reasonably, yes. It is a conventionally built UE4 title: predictable GPU-bound scaling, modest CPU appetite, working upscaling, and the usual engine quirks (traversal hitching on slow storage) rather than broken performance. The 87 FPS average at 1080p Ultra across thousands of combos is a healthy number for a game that looks this good.

The bottom line

High On Life occupies a comfortable middle ground in 2026: demanding enough to be a real benchmark, well-optimized enough that the benchmark means what it says. The numbers tell a clean story. 87 FPS at 1080p Ultra across nearly four thousand tested combinations means mid-range hardware is genuinely enough, and that is not something we can say about most good-looking releases of its era. 62 FPS at 1440p means the game belongs on high-refresh 1440p monitors, the sweet spot of the current PC market. And 38 FPS at 4K Ultra is the honest tax for native 4K, softened by upscaling that the game supports properly.

If you are choosing or upgrading a PC with this game in mind, the advice is refreshingly simple: buy the best GPU your budget allows, give it 16 GB of dual-channel memory and an NVMe SSD to stream from, and stop worrying about the processor once you reach a modern 6-core. High On Life will not embarrass a sensible build at any tier, and on a good one it is one of the better-looking ways to spend twelve hours with a talking gun insulting you. The data says what the reviews did: this one just works.