Atlas Fallen tech review: Laptop and desktop benchmarks

Internationally, Atlas Fallen has been met with a fairly mixed reception ranging from “good” to “quite disappointing”. Nevertheless, we do think the action RPG is an above-average game. Even though the Atlas Fallen features an exciting premise, its story quickly turns into a somewhat incoherent and dry affair, which amongst other things is the result of the game’s mediocre presentation (case in point: the dialogues). The great atmosphere at the beginning also loses some of its sheen over time. The game’s controls aren't without their flaws either. Despite having nice and fluid controls that are easy to pick up, the game feels rather clunky in many areas, especially considering the battle system can become slightly repetitive as time goes on.

Atlas Fallen could really use some refinement in the technical department. Whilst we didn’t have to struggle with crashes during our review unlike what many users have reported (particularly in Vulkan mode, which we used for testing and provides better performance than DX12 mode), at the time of writing this article, the game still contained a bug afftecting 12th and 13th gen Intel Core processors. Atlas Fallen places workload primarily on the E- instead of P-cores, resulting in performance that is worse than it could and actually should be. We thus disabled the E-cores in the BIOS whenever possible on affected review devices. The fact that lowering resolution hardly increases frame rates is another issue that hopefully will be fixed or at least improved with a patch in future.

Otherwise Atlas Fallen cuts an excellent figure both technically and graphically. Load times are delightfully short on modern SSDs, and the file size of around 30 GB is also quite moderate in 2023.

The graphics menu, which contains written descriptions but not comparison images, is neither barren nor extremely extensive. In the upper half, you will find options like refresh rate, display mode, resolution, VSync, resolution scaling (optional FSR2) and frame rate limit. In the lower half, there are four presets that affect five separate settings. Conveniently, the game lets you modify graphical settings without requiring a restart and will apply any changes after a brief loading process.

Atlas Fallen offers impressive visuals (textures, effects etc.) from medium settings onwards. However, players are going to regularly experience unsightly texture and object pop-ins regardless of which setting level they use.