Crimson Desert looks great in general, but it suffers from a fairly extreme amount of ghosting in certain situations, and the player base is now making a note of that. Though Crimson Desert is renowned for its graphics, among other things, there’s no denying that it’s far from perfect in that respect, and ghosting in particular can be a hard problem for players to deal with.
Crimson Desert looks and runs reasonably well for what it is, given the scope and complexity of the game as a whole. Instead of relying on off-the-shelf options like Unreal Engine 5, developer Pearl Abyss has chosen to use its own in-house Black Space engine. Black Space was built on top of the studio’s prior Black Desert Engine, as seen in Black Desert Online, and it’s proven to be an impressively flexible bit of kit. Its rendering suffers from many of the same problems most other modern game engines suffer from, however, such as ghosting.
Crimson Desert Has One Rule You Need to Learn Early
Crimson Desert looks like a game you can rush through, but learning to slow down and explore its world is the key to avoiding its toughest roadblocks.
Crimson Desert’s Ghosting Problems Are a Big Deal
Though it’s not the first time someone has brought up ghosting in the context of Crimson Desert, the problem was brought into the limelight again when one PlayStation 5 player posted a Reddit video showing it in practice. Ghosting is an artifact of the modern game’s rendering technology, which relies on cross-frame temporal data for image stability. The effect is that of excessive after-imaging that is particularly visible in high-contrast and low-light areas. As there are no apparent plans to reduce ghosting in Crimson Desert‘s next big update, it’s likely to remain a problem for the foreseeable future.
Crimson Desert‘s ghosting problem is entirely platform-agnostic, though some settings can alleviate it to an extent. PC players enjoying Crimson Desert can rely on the platform’s wealth of graphics utilities to see what settings work best for them. Nvidia users, for example, can give Ray Reconstruction a shot, which helps albeit at a substantial performance cost. Disabling upscaling technologies like DLSS and FSR may also help, as upscaling can exacerbate pre-existing ghosting issues by a fair bit. This, too, comes at a performance cost, however, and it might not help all that much.
While PC players can at least fiddle around with Crimson Desert‘s graphics settings to see which options reduce ghosting on their setup, this isn’t really the case for console players. While Crimson Desert opens up some console settings to tweak, they largely won’t change how ghosting works or how players perceive it. Switching over to Quality Mode with a lower target frame-rate is definitely worth giving a shot, in any case.
Rearrange the covers into the correct US release order.
Rearrange the covers into the correct US release order.
Easy (5)Medium (7)Hard (10)
Crimson Desert is a potential 2026 bestseller, which means a great number of players will experience its highest highs and lowest lows. Ghosting, once noticed, becomes a particularly annoying problem with no easy resolution outside of developer intervention. Between ghosting, extreme performance dips in certain situations, and overall bugginess, it’s slowly becoming clear that Crimson Desert has a fair bit of technical debt that Pearl Abyss should focus on sooner, rather than later.
- Released
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March 19, 2026
- ESRB
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Mature 17+ / Blood, Drug Reference, Intense Violence, Strong Language
- Developer(s)
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Pearl Abyss
- Publisher(s)
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Pearl Abyss
