Crimson Desert can perform well on PC, but you’ll need to win its crash lottery first

The words “consensus” and “RPS treehouse” are normally alien to one another, as is apparent from all the blood splatter on every new RPS 100. Yet among those of us who’ve been playing open world everything-’em-up Crimson Desert, an agreement has formed that its vastness – its 150-odd gigabytes of ideas, mechanics, and sheer maximalist fantasy – can too easily feel unwieldy.

To a degree, the same is true of its PC performance. It’s not bad, and often balances its gleaming visuals with smooth framerates quite well. Good support for new (but not too new) flavours of DLSS and FSR, as well. It’s also prone to instability and inconsistency, and while it’s positively receptive to the right settings changes, even this requires navigating through some confusingly labelled upscaling options and possibly the most unusual implementation of ray tracing – or, more specifically, Ray Reconstruction – in all of PC gamedom.

Nonetheless, navigate it we shall.

Crimson Desert system requirements and PC performance

Outside of that honking great storage requirement, Crimson Desert’s official hardware specs aren’t especially scary. Only 16GB of RAM is needed across the board – good if you happen to be in the midst of, say, a months-long memory crisis – and the graphics cards needed for min-spec play are limited to the likes of the old (the GTX 1060) or the crap (the RX 6500 XT). Even Ultra 4K refrains from asking for the truly top-end stuff.

That said, I wouldn’t actually recommend tackling Crimson Desert with something as humble as the GTX 1060. With Nvidia’s aged card in the test rig, running the Minimum preset plus Quality-level FSR 3.1 upscaling, it scraped a 33fps average 1080p – but looked hideous. The combination of rock-bottom effects and the inherent fuzziness of this older FSR version upscaling to 1080p makes Crimson Desert a crinkly, artifact-spewing mess.

By contrast, a more recent, capable mid-ranger makes it look rather nice. The RTX 4060 can comfortably handle the High preset at native 1080p, averaging 62fps while much more effectively maintaining the game’s sunny fantasy vibes (and heavy environmental detailing). Add Quality DLSS 4.5, which unlike FSR 3.1, doesn’t look half bad at 1080p, and that produces a tangibly slicker 72fps.

Crimson Desert scales well with beefier kit, too. I don’t have an RTX 4070 to test the High/1440p requirements, but the RTX 4070 Ti caned these settings, averaging 105fps with Quality DLSS. Upgrading to the Cinematic preset, the highest available, still kept it to a tasty 93fps. As for the top-specified Radeon RX 9070 XT, that managed 78fps at 4K/Ultra with help from Quality-level FSR – and this was FSR 4, the upscaler’s better-looking and most recent (though RX 9000-exclusive) upgrade. Swapping to Cinematic saw it average 71fps, too, and if you picked up the RX 9070 XT to power a 1440p rig instead, know that the same settings produced 104fps at this lower resolution.

I also tried the RTX 5080, which with Quality DLSS, pumped out 79fps at 4K/Cinematic. This also makes the lush, leafy hills of Crimson Desert’s starting area look fabulous, though I was perhaps expecting more than an 8fps gap over the much, much cheaper RX 9070 XT. On the bright side, high framerates like this are ideal conditions to flick on DLSS’ Multi Frame Generation (MFG). With this set to 4x mode, that 79fps became 205fps, with little in the way of tangible input lag gain, or visible image errors.

Update 20/3: After I tempted fate by not bothering to test any Intel Arc GPUs, developers Pearl Abyss have confirmed that Crimson Desert is not compatible with Intel Arc GPUs. Original article continues below.

When everything works, Crimson Desert is a respectable runner on PC. The real trick, though, is getting lucky with the “works” part. RPS guidesmen Ollie and Jeremy have, along with myself, been sat around a glitched-out campfire swapping stories of irritating, sometimes gamebreaking stability problems. A minor but recurring issue, for instance, is the pause menu getting stuck on the map screen, losing the ability to shuffle to any of the other submenus. Poor Jeremy’s also got stuck on the game loading transition, forcing a restart. More worrying are the multiple cases we’ve seen of Crimson Desert crashing, sometimes on startup and sometimes upon entering certain early-game areas. In the latter case, the only workaround was importing someone else’s save game from slightly further ahead – and people playing at home probably won’t have a handy team of guides writers to borrow one from.

Strictly in my own experience, I’ve got off relatively lightly: the only recurring crash problem I’ve had, on desktop hardware, was fixed by reinstalling my GPU drivers, so that may be Nvidia’s fault rather than the game’s. Though I’ve also seen plenty of traversal stutter, flickering lights and textures, asset pop-in (even on Cinematic quality), and a temporary but peculiar issue where changing a graphics setting would quietly reset the output resolution to 1600×900, well beyond my monitor’s native rez. Trying to run Crimson Desert on a Steam Deck also resulted in a whole lot of black screens, though granted, performance on the GTX 1060 suggests the Deck couldn’t get a passable framerate going even if it could launch.

Some, maybe many of these might be addressed by the promised day-one patch. Though considering the size of Crimson Desert – and that its playerbase seems likely to jump from a handful of press hacks to potentially millions – I do worry that there are more game-goes-kaput problems still to uncover.

Then there’s the harmless, if somewhat odd manner in which Crimson Desert presents some of its more advanced PC tech. One of these, I take as vindication for my previous moaning about the confusing labelling of different DLSS 4.5 upscaling models: on a compatible graphics card, the settings menu offers DLSS 4.5 as an option, but then also offers ‘DLSS 4.5 L’ and DLSS 4.0 as alternatives, and even the literal descriptions that the game provides in that same menu do a poor job of explaining how each version/model differs. It takes preexisting technical knowledge and process of elimination to figure out that DLSS 4.5 is, in fact, DLSS 4.5 Model M, the more generalist of the two (Model L is designed for Ultra Performance upscaling to 4K).

That’s a frivolous nitpick, however, next to how Crimson Desert deals with ray tracing. Turning this on or off – it’s a simple toggle – initially appears to have little effect on both visuals and performance, marking it as an exceptionally lightweight RT implementation. But, enable both ray tracing and DLSS Ray Reconstruction (or FSR Ray Regeneration on compatible Radeons), and the graphical difference becomes much starker. This is unheard of: Ray Reconstruction/Regeneration typically only cleans up the game’s main ray tracing or path tracing effects, producing minor visual improvements, but here it functionally acts as the true RTX On/RTX Off button.

This wouldn’t really be a concern, except the performance impact of RR Two Ways is devastating. On every GPU I tested, with varying degrees of upscaling help, it consistently ate around 50% of the average framerate, even bringing the mighty RTX 5080 down from 79fps to 35fps at 4K. Whether it looks better than standard ray tracing, I’ll leave between you and your eyes, but it’s extremely unconventional for a tool that usually just performs touch-up work to overhaul a game to this extent.

Still, at least it doesn’t cause any more crashes. I think.

Crimson Desert best settings guide

With six graphics presets to pick from, Crimson Desert isn’t lacking in one-click fixes. It also maintains most of its handsomeness all the way down to Medium (which, in another of the game’s quirks, is the first Medium preset I’ve seen to include ray tracing effects by default), so there’s little reason to fear the selective chopping of individual settings to secure some extra performance and make those stutters less intrusive.

Cinematic preset, native 1080p

Sure enough, the optimal bag o’ settings – mainly based on testing with the RTX 4060 at 1080p – is a blend of Cinematic and Medium, where the Cinematics have little to no impact on performance while the Mediums can eke out a few extra frames without making their respective details look proper uggo. Behold:

• Upscale mode: DLSS 4.0/FSR 4 (FSR 3.1 in a pinch)
• Upscale resolution: Quality
• Frame generation: Off
• Ray Reconstruction/Ray Regeneration: Off
• Nvidia Reflex: On (if supported)
• Model quality: Medium
• Texture quality: Cinematic
• Shadow quality: Medium
• Ray tracing: On
• Lighting quality: Medium
• Reflection quality: Cinematic
• Advanced weather effect: On
• Water quality: Cinematic
• Foliage density: Medium
• Volumetric fog quality: High
• Effect quality: Effect quality
• Simulation quality: Cinematic
• Post-processing effect quality: Cinematic

Unsurprisingly, the most thrusting of all the performance boosts here comes from upscaling. While the RTX 4060 could run Cinematic mode at 52fps at native 1080p, Quality-level DLSS 4.5 got that up to 66fps, and with even sharper sharpness and more detailed detailing than the stock antialiasing could muster. You’ll notice, though, that I’ve gone for the older DLSS 4 in this guide. To my eyes, it looks more natural and less processed than DLSS 4.5 or DLSS 4.5 L, and on the 4060, was also the fastest of the three: 70fps on Quality, versus the newer versions’ respective 66fps and 63fps. Maybe that’s just Crimson Desert being weird again, but there we are.

Speaking of DLSS, I’ve left frame gen off, but you can have it on if you’re consistently netting above 70fps or so. What I’m more fiercely averse to is Ray Reconstruction/Regeneration – I actually do think it looks nicer, in a lot of places, but like with path tracing, the frame tax is just too heavy. The regular ray tracing setting, at least, can be left on for most PCs, as the difference between it being enabled and disabled on the 4060 was zero frames per second. No, that’s not a mistake. Yes, I checked.

All in all, these settings got my RTX 4060 up from 52fps on Cinematic to 76fps, a chunky 46% improvement. It’s unfortunate that Crimson Desert’s evident performance wins aren’t matched by a more reliable stability, but if you’re lucky enough to escape the worst of its technical splutters, you can at least get it ticking along without any massive quality sacrifices.