At release, the Digital Foundry editorial team compared the image in Crimson Desert on PS5 to graphics at the Nintendo Switch level. After some time, experts checked if anything had changed with the release of fresh updates.
At the start, the game offered an unacceptably blurry image in 60 fps mode on the Sony console, as the developers did not use FSR upscaling. The situation changed on Sunday: Pearl Abyss released a patch, adding the "Fixed 4K" option, which activates FSR. The image sharpness has noticeably increased, and the project has finally started to look playable.
However, the reason why FSR was not added immediately quickly became clear – a sharp drop in performance. DF analysis shows: where the "blurry" mode without upscaling gives 55–60 fps, turning on FSR drops the frequency to 42–48 fps. Thus, you have to pay for sharpness with smoothness.
The situation has not changed in locations with a high CPU load: even without FSR, the game produces about 30 fps. There are also problems in "quality" mode: during normal exploration, the frame rate can drop to 27 fps.
There is also good news: the developers have eliminated the "slide show" in one of the battles with bosses on PS5 and PS5 Pro. If earlier there were about 10 fps, now the animation stays around 30 frames. Nevertheless, Pearl Abyss still has a lot of work to do on optimizing the console versions of Crimson Desert for PC and other platforms.
