Crimson Desert is breath of fresh air for budget gamers as it reportedly runs at 60 FPS on even old entry-level GPUs
Crimson Desert is, perhaps, the most talked-about game of recent memory, and for good reason. The game is massive. It features an immense and rich open world to explore with a plethora of side quests and boss fights. What has come as a positive surprise is that, despite an excellent graphical presentation, Crimson Desert is well-optimized out of the box and doesn’t need much GPU horsepower to run at a steady 60 FPS.
Hardware Unboxed has measured Crimson Desert’s performance with 40 GPUs and a Ryzen 7 9800X3D. The results speak for themselves, as Crimson Desert is shown to run at a stable 60 FPS even with modest GPUs like the RX 7600.
Crimson Desert at 1080p
At 1080p with the highest-quality “Cinematic” preset, Crimson Desert only needs an RTX 3060 Ti with 8 GB of VRAM to hit a 60 FPS average. However, you’ll need an RTX 4060 Ti to play the game smoothly, with 1% lows in the mid 50s. Modern affordable GPUs like the RTX 5060 and the RX 9060, therefore, are more than capable of running Crimson Desert at a stable 60+ FPS.
Dropping the graphical preset down to “High” lets even the RX 7600 play the game at 60 FPS. Modern GPUs like the RX 9060 XT and the RTX 5060 can run the game above 80 FPS without any issues.
You can even run Crimson Desert at around 100 FPS with just the last-gen RTX 4070 and the RX 7900 GRE.
Finally, if you can only manage a card like the RTX 5050, you will need to drop the settings down from high or use FSR/DLSS to hit 60 FPS.
Crimson Desert at 1440p
At 1440p, if you want to play the game at the highest “Cinematic” settings, you will need cards like the RTX 5060 Ti and the RX 7800 XT to stay above an average 60 FPS. The RTX 5070 and the RX 9070 can manage around 80 FPS on average, while the RTX 5070 Ti can reach 100 FPS.
So, high-refresh-rate 1440p gameplay in Crimson Desert reportedly requires the RTX 5070 Ti, the RTX 5080, and the RTX 5090. However, once you drop down to the “High” settings, even the RTX 5070 can net you around a 100 FPS.
If you just want a solid 60 FPS at 1440p, Hardware Unboxed shows that you only need an RTX 5060 or the RX 9060 XT (available on Amazon).
Crimson Desert at 4K
While not the hardest game to run at 4K, Crimson Desert demands an RTX 4080 Super/RTX 5070 Ti for 60 FPS and an RTX 5080 if you want the FPS to remain comfortably above 60 at the highest setting. An RTX 5090 is required for 100 FPS at native resolution.
Crimson Desert fully supports DLSS 4.5 and FSR 4.0. So, if you can’t muster up an RTX 5070 Ti, an RX 9070, or an RTX 5070, you can manage 60 FPS with image upscaling enabled.
At 4K/”High” settings, the RX 9070 and the RTX 5070 become viable 60 FPS GPUs without using any image reconstruction.
Crimson Desert favors Nvidia GeForce GPUs over Radeon cards
Interestingly enough, GeForce RTX cards perform better than their Radeon counterparts in Crimson Desert. The RTX 5070 Ti, a GPU that is slower than the RX 9070 XT, appears around 13% faster than the RX 9070 XT in Crimson Desert across different resolutions. We expect the performance of the game to get better with post-launch patches. So, developer Pearl Abyss might fix this discrepancy with updates.
Simply put, you can play Crimson Desert even if you have a low-end GPU like the RTX 5050. This is a pretty awesome development in a time when it feels like almost all new AAA game releases are broken, and poorly performing.
Buy the RTX 5060 | RTX 5060 Ti on Amazon
Source(s)
Hardware Unboxed on YouTube, Teaser image source: Pearl Abyss, Pixabay, edited
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