Digital Foundry has been praising the "supposedly beautiful graphics" in Crimson Desert for weeks. However, the reality looks worse than the American editorial team describes.
Can the game be called a performance champion that "eats Unreal Engine 5 for breakfast"? Not really. The project on Pearl Abyss's own engine shows a level of performance comparable to Kingdom Come 2, but the overall graphics are noticeably weaker than Warhorse's work.
Below are the results of Hardware Unboxed tests with frame rates on NVIDIA and AMD video cards in native 4K at maximum settings ("Cinematic").
I'm a little disappointed with the performance of AMD Radeon cards. They show a worse result than I expected. And this is an AMD-sponsored product.
The editors also drew attention to the problems with the graphics. With a large draw radius, objects nearby suffer from weak textures. In some scenes, it looks so bad that the game needs a set of 4K textures for PC. At the same time, VRAM usage remains low. Noisy images and weak geometry are noted.
