Introduction
Crimson Desert is the most successful open-world action-adventure RPG this year, developed by Pearl Abyss—the Korean studio behind Black Desert Online. The game launched earlier this month, but I couldn’t review it any faster, and there were also a bunch of patches and updates that improved the game in the meantime. Set in the medieval fantasy continent of Pywel, players take on the role of Kliff, the leader of a band of mercenaries, in a story-driven adventure that blends large-scale open-world exploration with intense action combat. The game features a vast, seamless open world with dynamic weather, day-night cycles, and impressively detailed environments—from lush forests and snow-covered mountains to sprawling towns and underground ruins. Combat is significantly more involved than in Black Desert Online, with weighty animations, a variety of weapons and abilities, and large-scale set-piece battles.
Crimson Desert is built on Pearl Abyss’s proprietary BlackSpace engine and uses DirectX 12. Upscaling support includes NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR 4. Frame generation is supported for both AMD and NVIDIA, NVIDIA MFG is supported, too. NVIDIA DLSS Ray Reconstruction and NVIDIA Reflex are available as separate toggles. AMD Ray Regeneration is also supported. No love for Intel—the Arc GPUs were originally blocked from launching the game entirely, with Pearl Abyss telling Arc owners to “seek refunds.” After community backlash and Intel publicly stating they had offered optimization assistance for years, Pearl Abyss reversed course and allowed the game to boot on Arc GPUs—but rendering remains completely broken as of the latest version 1.01.02, producing a mostly black screen with severe artifacts. We expect Pearl Abyss and Intel to work together to resolve this in a future update. Ray tracing is available via a single on/off toggle. HDR and ultrawide 21:9 are fully supported.
This review will evaluate the performance of Crimson Desert across a wide range of contemporary graphics cards, compare image quality settings, and analyze the game’s VRAM usage to provide insight into the hardware requirements needed for an optimal experience.
