Crimson Desert gets the edge on PC with a transformative graphics upgrade

Crimson Desert is at the very top of my wishlist (I can say this definitively now that Slay the Spire 2 is out), and it's just days away. The vast open-world game from Black Desert Online developer Pearl Abyss has impressed me with every showing, and its gorgeous environments and smooth action are a big part of that. But with hardware experts Digital Foundry given access to conduct more extensive testing, it's come to light that the PC version of Crimson Desert offers ray tracing options that are so impactful "it essentially unlocks an ultra-quality lighting not found on any other platform."

Digital Foundry's Alex Battaglia was so impressed by the visual upgrade offered by the ray tracing settings in Crimson Desert that he made a standalone video to showcase it. Ray tracing is fundamental to the game's lighting on all platforms, and it's been optimized to run smoothly, even on lower-end systems. On PC, however, you're able to opt into using AMD FSR Ray Regeneration or Nvidia DLSS Ray Reconstruction instead, if you have a card that supports it. "This would usually be a tertiary thing I would talk about in a review, but here it is so fundamental that I just had to make a video about it," Battaglia remarks.

The result of those optimizations to Crimson Desert's default ray-traced global illumination is a notable visual quality hit. In comparison, Nvidia and AMD's alternatives provide a dramatic upgrade with improved denoising. "I could not believe it the first time I toggled it on and off," Battaglia says. It's so significant that he compares it to the difference between turning ray tracing on and off altogether, and watching the footage in action in the video below, I'd agree with that assessment. It's a major improvement that I'll certainly be looking to take advantage of.

The Crimson Desert system requirements are relatively modest, and it looks to offer a wide range of customizable options to find the sweet spot that works for your build. That's good news if you're holding off on an upgrade among soaring component prices. Anyone who has a modern build with a bit more power behind it will want to head straight to the settings menu and see if they can handle the switch, however.

Naturally, this improved visual clout comes with a cost on the performance side, and it is pretty notable. Digital Foundry reports a 14% average drop in frame rates when enabling Ray Reconstruction on an RTX 5080 running 4K performance mode. AMD is even more significant, with a 24% hit on the RX 9070 XT when using FSR4's Ray Regeneration. "I think any and every person who has a capable GPU should turn these features on, definitely," Battaglia concludes, but he caveats that you may need to "adjust your priorities in other settings to maintain your performance goals."

If you were trying to decide where to buy Crimson Desert, this could well be a game-changer, although the PC version hasn't escaped controversy. The recent confirmation of Denuvo DRM is certain to prove unpopular with at least some players. Pearl Abyss has stressed that all benchmarks have been created using the same Denuvo implementation that will feature in the launch build, including Digital Foundry's performance videos, so hopefully that means we won't see a performance hit in the full game. We won't be waiting long to know for sure.