(Credit: Pearl Abyss)
In the world of gaming GPU performance, AMD is typically considered an also-ran. With a mere 10% of the Steam gaming market, perhaps that's wise. But developer Pearl Abyss chose to use an AMD GPU to showcase the performance and visual beauty of its upcoming game, Crimson Desert. And it used the last-generation RX 7900 XTX and Ryzen 9 7900X3D, too.
Pearl Abyss is most well-known for its open-world RPG Black Desert Online, and for being the parent company of Eve Online developer CCP Games. Crimson Desert, out March 19, is another expansive open-world game, and the new technology demonstration highlights its enormous scope and gorgeous visuals. Normally, these kinds of things use Nvidia's top-tier cards and technologies, but this time around, AMD is front and center.
A Digital Foundry (DF) breakdown of the trailer showcases impressive visuals in a variety of in-game biomes, weather settings, and times of day, with seamless transitions and incredibly smooth performance. DF claims it remains a consistent 60fps, even at ultra settings on this older hardware. When it does dip occasionally, performance is consistent throughout the game, standing in stark contrast to many recent Unreal Engine 5 releases, they note.
The game features notable lighting effects. There's a combination of techniques at play, using a mix of screen-spaced reflections with a ray-traced pass, depending on the scene.
It feels especially strange to see AMD hardware at the heart of a ray-traced demonstration, given that it's typically a generation or so behind Nvidia on that front.
Although this demonstration does use upscaling technology, it was at 4K native AA, so there's still a lot of scope for FPS boosting with settings and FSR tweaks. It also used last-generation hardware (and not even the top CPU of its generation), showing a real vote of confidence in the game's optimization. The fact that it appears to run so well cements that.
The choice of AMD hardware wasn't just to leverage its upscaling technologies, though. The developers have confirmed that Crimson Desert will also support Nvidia's DLSS 4 and multi-frame generation from day one, so Nvidia GPU owners will be able to leverage their hardware technologies to the fullest.