Crimson Desert: A Visual Showcase Powered by AMD

Developer Pearl Abyss, renowned for Black Desert Online and parent company to CCP Games (Eve Online), has unveiled impressive preview footage of their upcoming open-world RPG, Crimson Desert. What’s particularly noteworthy? The demonstration ran flawlessly on AMD hardware – specifically, the last-generation RX 7900 XTX GPU and Ryzen 9 7900X3D processor.

A Shift in the Landscape

Traditionally, high-profile game demonstrations like these often feature Nvidia’s top-tier cards and technologies. However, Pearl Abyss has bucked this trend, choosing AMD to highlight the performance and visual fidelity of Crimson Desert. This is a significant vote of confidence in AMD’s capabilities, especially considering AMD typically holds around 10% of the Steam gaming market.

Impressive Performance and Visuals

A detailed breakdown by Digital Foundry (DF) showcases the game’s stunning visuals across diverse in-game environments, weather conditions, and times of day. The transitions are seamless, and the performance remains remarkably consistent, maintaining a solid 60fps even at ultra settings. DF notes this stability is a welcome contrast to many recent Unreal Engine 5 releases.

Lighting and Ray Tracing

Crimson Desert boasts impressive lighting effects, utilizing a combination of screen-space reflections and ray-traced passes. It’s somewhat surprising to see AMD hardware at the forefront of a ray-tracing demonstration, given Nvidia’s historical lead in this area. Despite employing upscaling technology, the demonstration was run at native 4K resolution with anti-aliasing, leaving room for further FPS gains through settings adjustments and AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR).

Optimized for a Wide Range of Hardware

The choice of last-generation hardware, and not even the top CPU of that generation, underscores the game’s impressive optimization. This suggests Crimson Desert is designed to run well on a broad spectrum of systems.

Nvidia Support Confirmed

While AMD hardware was used for the demonstration, Pearl Abyss has confirmed that Crimson Desert will also support Nvidia’s DLSS 4 and multi-frame generation from day one. This ensures Nvidia GPU owners can fully leverage their hardware’s capabilities.

Release Date

Crimson Desert is scheduled for release on March 19th. Keep an eye out for more updates as we get closer to launch!

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