Pearl Abyss’s upcoming action-adventure game Crimson Desert looks unreal, in the literal sense of the word. Depending on how you look at it, that’s either a compliment or an accusation, but the prevailing sentiment amongst the general public is that the game is impressively beautiful to the point that it all comes across as a little too good to be true.
The ambivalence is understandable. Plenty of games look great in carefully captured footage, recorded on PC hardware that would set you back five figures, but appear noticeably less impressive when you finally get your hands on them. Well, now that Digital Foundry’s First Look Tech Preview for Crimson Desert is out, you can count me among the believers.
Digital Foundry’s Alex Battaglia and John Linneman were sent some exclusive handcrafted footage of Crimson Desert’s performance on PC, curated by Pearl Abyss’s team during a preview event that was held earlier last week. Pearl Abyss decided to take the opportunity to flex a little with the footage they provided, as they purposefully used a PC with last-gen hardware to capture it.
Said hardware includes a Ryzen 9 7900X3D processor, 32GB of system memory, and a Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics card; hardly cheap, but nowhere near top end, and something you could easily build for just over $2,000. The flexing part of the showcased footage is the graphical settings Crimson Desert used; upscaled at 4K Native AA, a consistent 60 frames per second, ray tracing on, particle quality effects set to 100, and with everything set to “Ultra” quality. For context, Ultra is the second-highest quality setting in Crimson Desert, with “Cinematic” being the highest.
For those of you who have better things to do than familiarize yourself with the ins and outs of PC hardware, let’s just say that this is mindbogglingly impressive stuff, considering that this is a graphics card from 2022 we’re talking about. As Battaglia explains in his breakdown, this level of performance isn’t the norm. “This is obviously a work-in-progress build at ultra high settings, at native 4K, but it’s running pretty darn well. Definitely running quite differently than a lot of Unreal Engine games would run at native 4K.”
Most of this technical wizardry can be put down to Pearl Abyss’s BlackSpace Engine, which Crimson Desert is the first game to utilise. It’s ridiculously impressive stuff, and Digital Foundry’s preview was more than enough to convince me of its capabilities. I’d never go as far as saying you should pre-order Crimson Desert based on all this, although that’s more to do with the fact that I think pre-ordering any game is silly, but it’s assuaged me of most of my doubts. Let’s just hope the gameplay matches up to the performance.
