Over the past few years, PC games have been facing an optimization problem. Leaning heavily on upscaling solutions like Nvidia’s DLSS and AMD’s FSR, developers have been releasing ultra-detailed games, and hoping that these technologies will help mitigate the performance cost. Crimson Desert is a bit different, though.
While Crimson Desert is genuinely a beautiful – albeit buggy – game, developer Pearl Abyss announced super reasonable PC system requirements leading up to launch. What was particularly interesting about these is that some of the builds called out upscaling – but many didn’t, so I just had to test the game at native resolution to see how it held up.
And, sure, Crimson Desert does struggle a little bit on low-end cards like the Radeon RX 6500 XT, but not by enough that switching on FSR doesn’t bring it over that 60 fps threshold. And once you get to the mid-range, Crimson Desert holds up as a game where upscaling serves its original purpose as an image quality and performance enhancement, rather than a requirement.
How I Tested
The first thing that jumped out at me when I was looking at Crimson Desert’s system requirements is how many generations of hardware were represented. The minimum requirements call for an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060, and that GPU came out ten years ago.
The game has to be well-optimized in order for such a wide range of hardware to be represented in Pearl Abyss’ system requirements, so I wanted to see just how well the game would scale. The problem, though, is that the range of hardware was a little too broad.
The game’s requirements call out an AMD Ryzen 5 2600X at the low-end, for instance, and I just don’t have one of those any more. The oldest CPU I have lying around that has a motherboard that could run it is the Ryzen 5 7600, so I opted for that for the lower-end builds, swapping to the Ryzen 7 9800X3D when I got to the higher-end specs.
Crimson Desert also calls for 16GB of RAM at every recommendation level. The catch here is that I only have 16GB DDR5 sticks, which means that if I wanted to adhere to this requirement, I’d have to run my memory in single-channel mode, which would hurt performance. I would just go out and buy a 16GB kit with two 8GB sticks to get around this, but with RAM prices being what they are – I’m not going to do that.
That leaves us with the graphics cards. I do have most of the GPUs to test out most of Crimson Desert’s performance tiers, with one exception: the GTX 1060. While I do have an old GTX 1060 Founders Edition on my shelf, when I plugged it in to test Crimson Desert, it didn’t feel like posting anymore, so it seems like that card is going to that big gaming PC upstate – it served me well over the years.
But even though I don’t have the GPUs on hand to test the minimum spec, I was able to test the game on the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X. Curiously, in Pearl Abyss’ system requirements for the Xbox Ally X, it calls out very similar quality settings for the handheld as it does for the 2016 graphics card – minimum graphics settings and 1080p upscaled from a lower resolution. The GTX 1060 probably would have ended up being more powerful than the handheld, but only by a bit.
To test the frame rate across all of these GPUs (and handheld), I recorded performance while walking through Hernand Town, the first city. While this isn’t the most stressful location, with combat greatly impacting your performance, it is repeatable, making it easier to get a good idea of what the baseline frame rate for each graphics card looks like.
Rather than running every GPU at the same settings, I really wanted to test Crimson Desert’s recommended settings for every graphics card. So I used this graphic as a guide, testing the graphics preset, resolution and upscaling specifically called out. And, well, for the most part Pearl Abyss seems to underestimate the performance of its game.
Crimson Desert Xbox Ally X Performance
For as popular as the Steam Deck is, Crimson Desert simply won’t run on the SteamOS handheld right now. Instead, the only way to play Crimson Desert on a handheld right now is to run it on an Asus ROG Xbox Ally X, or a similar Windows handheld. While that’s a shame, the extra power of the Z2 Extreme would probably be needed to play this game anyways.
Pearl Abyss recommends three different settings profiles for the Xbox Ally X: ‘Performance’, ‘Balanced’ and ‘Quality’, with the former two leaning heavily on upscaling and frame generation. What’s wild is that unlike the specs called out for desktop, these don’t have a recommended graphics preset. But, after testing it, you’re going to want to stick with the ‘Minimum’ preset.
Running Crimson Desert at 1080p with FSR set to Quality – which will set the rendering resolution to 720p – you’ll get 40 fps, which is definitely playable, even if the minimum settings aren’t the easiest on your eyes. You can turn on FSR frame generation to stretch the frame rate to 67 fps, but I wouldn’t actually recommend it. It might look visually smoother, but there is definitely some noticeable input lag there that doesn’t make the game feel great – and that was just walking around in town.
But with how beautiful the game is once you start cranking up the quality settings and resolution, I’d recommend sticking with a gaming PC or a console, if you have the option.
PC Performance
While Crimson Desert looks like it’d be the kind of game that cripples hardware, it’s surprisingly easy to run, as long as you have a decent graphics card. I didn’t have the GTX 1060 to test its absolutely minimum spec, but I did have an AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT, and was surprised that it was actually able to keep up – and with better than Pearl Abyss’ quoted performance.
To be clear, rather than pairing the 6500 XT with the 2600X Pearl Abyss calls for, I paired it with the 7600, which is significantly faster, but the low-end GPU still managed to average 40 fps at low settings at 1080p. That’s without upscaling, too, and when I enabled FSR on the ‘Balanced’ preset, which renders the game at 635p, I was able to get 53 fps out of it, getting it closer to that 60 fps sweet spot.
The AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT is the first card that Pearl Abyss says can hit 60 fps, with the Medium preset at 1080p. And, at least in the little laps around Hernand Town, the 6700 absolutely hits that mark, averaging 65 fps over the one-minute lap. You can buy yourself more breathing room with FSR, though, which will bring your average fps up to 83 fps, when you set it to the ‘Balanced’ option. This is also the first preset that turns ray tracing on, and even with a pretty accessible graphics card, it has no problem clearing 60 fps.
Moving on to the Nvidia RTX 4070, and we’re off to a new resolution: 1440p. Setting it to the high preset, the game starts looking incredible. And with this last-generation mid-range GPU, Crimson Desert averages 75 fps without any kind of upscaling.
With the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT, the developer claims you should be able to run the game at 60 fps with the Ultra preset at a native 4K. In the loop around Hernand Town, the Radeon RX 9070 XT managed to just hit that level, averaging 62 fps. However, once I turned FSR to Performance, to render the game at 1080p and upscale back up to 4K, the 9070 XT was able to get a solid 75 fps.
I didn’t have an RTX 5070 Ti on-hand to directly test against the Radeon RX 9070 XT, but with the same settings, the RTX 5080 got 74 fps in the same loop, which falls in line with what I’d expect from Nvidia’s penultimate graphics card.
There is a graphics preset above Ultra, though, even though it doesn’t have a recommended graphics card in Pearl Abyss’ recommended specs. The Cinematic preset bumps almost all settings all the way up, except for lighting – which has a ‘max’ setting above it. To test this, I put in an RTX 5090, and at 4K with no DLSS, I was able to get an average of 95 fps. Then, of course, you can turn on DLSS and Frame Generation to get up to 338 fps with the same quality settings.
Can You Play Crimson Desert?
With how well Crimson Desert runs on pretty much every graphics card I tested, it might end up being one of the most well-optimized PC games in years. That’s in spite of the vast view distances and incredible lighting on offer.
Pretty much every modern graphics card will be able to run Crimson Desert without any kind of upscaling. Of course, DLSS and FSR are both supported, which can make the game run even better without really impacting the visual quality of the game.
Even on the Xbox Ally X, which is significantly weaker than any of the desktop graphics cards I tested, Crimson Desert runs just fine. It’s not going to fully saturate the handheld’s 144Hz display, but it doesn’t really need to – it’s still a great way to play the game when you’re away from your PC or your Xbox. Now, Pearl Abyss just needs to figure out how to get the game running on SteamOS and Bazzite.
Of course, just because the game is optimized to run well on a wide swath of PCs doesn’t mean that it’s not also chock-full of bugs and other quirks. For more on that, check out our review of Crimson Desert.
Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra
