Looking at other metrics, the optimization underway in BlackSpace becomes clearer. In power, for instance, the load is modest. Even Intel’s Raptor Lake chips don’t crack 140W, while they can easily climb above 170W in a game like Starfield.
It was challenging to find a test scene for Crimson Desert. The game is large, for one thing, but more importantly, it’s varied. The performance window is fairly large. You'll see good performance standing alone on a mountainside, better performance in a room with a couple of NPCs, and worse performance in a town filled with dozens. You know the drill. There’s also loading and culling to deal with. Given the size of Crimson Desert and the speed at which you can traverse vast distances in some situations, you can immediately put a heavy load on your CPU. Even in these extreme cases, however, I encountered just minor hiccups in performance.
For testing, I used the first town you spot in Hernand, which is filled with at least several dozen NPCs on the streets and likely a hundred or more dotted throughout various buildings. Out in the open world, NPCs are more sparse, and naturally, the demand on your processor is lower. This was about as close as I could get to a stress test without hitting some massive loading zone that wouldn’t represent the moment-to-moment gameplay.
Although performance is understandably variable across different areas of the map, Crimson Desert glides to different performance targets, whereas most games stumble. The engine would much rather have pop-in than a stutter, which is probably something most players will agree with. Any stuttering I encountered was minor and quickly resolved, and it never showed up in an important gameplay moment.
BlackSpace is doing a lot, and if you pixel peep too closely, you’ll see the magic tricks unravel. It has a gritty, aggressive rendering style clearly meant for a TV more than a monitor sitting a foot away from you. That’s not a bad thing. If you look for every little rendering hiccup or aliased edge, you’ll see the sacrifices Pearl Abyss had to make to pull Crimson Desert off. Take in the full image, however, and you’ll be left with your mouth agape.
It’s not just the rendering that’s impressive. Crimson Desert is a systems-driven game, and you interact with everything. You won’t clip through an NPC if you run into them; you’ll crash into another solid being and get told off in response. If a vendor carrying a basket of apples or potatoes stumbles, their goods will tumble out in physics-driven glory. You can cut down just about any tree to gather wood, and hunt just about any animal for food. In one surprising moment, I was able to collapse an outlook where an archer was shooting at me by hacking away at the support beams. The game looks so beautiful that it’s easy to forget that the world reacts to your actions along the lines of Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom.
I have dozens of more hours I need to put into the game, but my early testing impressions are positive. This game is on my shortlist of new titles to add into our CPU game testing suite, but I want to see how players react to the game first. It scales well, and if the game is popular enough, it’ll likely show up in our suite before long.
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Jake Roach is the Senior CPU Analyst at Tom\u2019s Hardware, writing reviews, news, and features about the latest consumer and workstation processors. ","collapsible":{"enabled":true,"maxHeight":250,"readMoreText":"Read more","readLessText":"Read less"}}), "https://slice.vanilla.futurecdn.net/13-4-18/js/authorBio.js"); } else { console.error('%c FTE ','background: #9306F9; color: #ffffff','no lazy slice hydration function available'); } Jake Roach Social Links Navigation Senior Analyst, CPUs Jake Roach is the Senior CPU Analyst at Tom’s Hardware, writing reviews, news, and features about the latest consumer and workstation processors.
PSUpower One of the most anticipated games of these last few months. I hope it's worth the wait, because i plan on buying it. Reply
thestryker Hopefully omitting ARL entirely is due to the forthcoming 250K/270K releases, because otherwise it's a really bad look. Reply
-Fran- thestryker said: Hopefully omitting ARL entirely is due to the forthcoming 250K/270K releases, because otherwise it's a really bad look. Exactly what I was goinf to ask and speculate on, lol. — Thanks for the review as always! Regards. Reply
patriotpa 1080P. NO ONE runs this type of game at 1080P….unless they have a crappy card that's only good at raster. Reply
User of Computers no ARL? I get that it's not the CPU of choice for gamers but having it would be a nice comparison point to check whether or not it can match RPL. Reply
User of Computers patriotpa said: 1080P. NO ONE runs this type of game at 1080P….unless they have a crappy card that's only good at raster. dude it's this thing called "CPU testing" that isolates every variable so that the CPU is the bottleneck. Reply
Hotrod2go -Fran- said: Exactly what I was goinf to ask and speculate on, lol. — Thanks for the review as always! Regards. Why? ARL is better now than when released, or are bios & chipset updates irrelevant? Reply
Makaveli patriotpa said: 1080P. NO ONE runs this type of game at 1080P….unless they have a crappy card that's only good at raster. Just say you don't understand CPU testing. Reply
Gururu patriotpa said: 1080P. NO ONE runs this type of game at 1080P….unless they have a crappy card that's only good at raster. Completely agree, though you can find more varied benchmarks popping up now. This game has been getting a lot of hype for doing open world modeling right. Gameplay is reported as somewhat chaotic, but I am very hopeful to add it to my library! Reply
aberkae patriotpa said: 1080P. NO ONE runs this type of game at 1080P….unless they have a crappy card that's only good at raster. Partially true, but I can see some running 4k dlss performance or fsr 4k performance where the base resolution is at 1080p. At 4k native the chart will just be more gpu bound. Reply
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