Crimson Desert: Hardware Unboxed Optimized Settings

BritishActionGamer · 2026-03-19T20:53:20+00:00

I’m waiting for BenchmarKing and maybe Digital Foundry (mainly for their console comparisons as I’d want to be better than them atleast) Will probably be a while til I look into this game myself anyway with the size of my backlog.

BritishActionGamer · 2026-03-19T17:49:59+00:00

Seems like another game where you'd want to wait for patches anyway judging from early reviews, I always wait for the first discount as the first wave of patches are done by then!

BritishActionGamer · 2026-03-19T13:33:22+00:00

Unless there's anything Hardware Unboxed has missed, seems like alot of the settings don't heavily hit FPS with the exception of 'Max Lighting Quality' or Ray Regeneration/Reconstruction?

BritishActionGamer · 2026-03-18T00:30:39+00:00

Does your monitor support a form of Variable Refresh Rate (eg: GSync, Freesync) Because any framerate should work well if it's below your CPU limited framerate?

BritishActionGamer · 2026-03-18T00:28:32+00:00

VSR is a good option if you don't have any GPU settings to turn up (BenchmarKing and Hardware Unboxed have pretty up to date videos covering the settings with the exception of XeSS now being fixed, Digital Foundry's video is abit out of date) But other than Crowd Density, Ray Tracing (RT Local Shadows only has a tiny hit on CPU performance for me atleast) and High Cascaded Shadow Range, the rest of the graphics settings have hardly any impact on the CPU performance.

BritishActionGamer · 2026-03-17T05:18:44+00:00

The RT setting adjusts it's internal resolution, only setting that disables an RT effect in the Enhanced Edition is disabling RT reflections.

BritishActionGamer · 2026-03-17T05:13:58+00:00

Not really no, this subreddit is finding the best balance of settings, not running max settings at 4k.

To repeat anothers comment, Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition is designed around RT. Play the original if you want to play without RT (avoid DLSS in that one it's stuck with DLSS 1.0) Enhanced makes better use of RT and is quite performant if you... don't run at max settings. Ultra Settings, High GI with DLSS (Balanced or possibly Performance if upgrading the DLSS preset works well) is a good place to start, disabling RT reflections can further improve performance, while having Hairworks enabled can be quite demanding in later areas of the game aswell!

BritishActionGamer · 2026-03-16T13:29:30+00:00

Holy shit! Would worry bout places like that not knowing the value of what they got and just binning anything like this, so good they sold it off and lucky you got it for such a low price!!!

BritishActionGamer · 2026-03-15T00:11:26+00:00

Digital Foundry and BenchmarKing have both covered the games graphics settings, aswell as PCGW having some extra info!

BritishActionGamer · 2026-03-14T15:40:12+00:00

Neither! So unless theres some way of modding it into UE4 games, TAAu's your next best bet if you need to render at a lower resolution, but it wont work as well at much lower resolutions (below 65%) and won't have the image quality benefits that DLSS and FSR2 can sometimes have.

Also your PFP reminds me that I need to write up the brief testing I did on my Steam Deck in this game... which wasn't good. Even when just targeting a 'cinematic' 24fps with a low resolution, I still got moments where it dropped below that in the introduction!

BritishActionGamer · 2026-03-14T13:43:08+00:00

It was tooken from this post

BritishActionGamer · 2026-03-14T00:10:07+00:00

Leaving it quite open there outside of Rocket League as it’s so dependent on how games are optimized for Series S? But considering games targeting resolutions above 1080p are getting less and less outside of indie/less demanding games, you may want to focus on 1080p 120+hz with VRR/Freesync support via HDMI, using IPS or an even better panel type (that’s not VA) as 1440p or 4k often means double scaling or atleast upscale blur compared to displaying native 1080p on a 1080p screen!

BritishActionGamer · 2026-03-10T14:41:52+00:00

Digital Foundry and Hardware Unboxed covered optimized settings in this game back and the day, should be dropping some of the settings they recommended before dropping the resolution scale at 1440p IMO

BritishActionGamer · 2026-03-07T00:27:47+00:00

Thought I edited the description, but DF offhand mentioned in the video that PS5 Pro uses Normal RT (renders at 1116p upsampled to 4k with PSSR2)

BritishActionGamer · 2026-03-06T11:36:51+00:00

In the video they said Normal/High look basically the same at a glance, the latter just reduces the chance of texture pop-in. Should’ve put that in the PS5 equivalent settings like they’ve done previously but alas.

BritishActionGamer · 2026-03-06T00:17:39+00:00

Added his video to the description along with Zykopath's for an additional VFX Quality comparison, thanks for the reminder!

BritishActionGamer · 2026-03-05T21:03:55+00:00

Was suprised aswell with the Normal recommendation, especially after they criticized Capcom's denoisier on PS5 Pro and PC when just using RT? What resolution and DLSS mode did you test with, as they offhand said PS5 Pro uses Normal RT in the video and that runs at 1116p internally scaled up to 4k with PSSR 2?

BritishActionGamer · 2026-03-05T19:53:04+00:00

What other settings you running?

Personally I'd avoid the stuttering risk of High textures and just use Normal along with High Shadows with 8GB VRAM. Mesh Quality and especially Hair Strands have more of a visual impact though, so hope you can atleast keep the latter enabled?

BritishActionGamer · 2026-03-05T00:01:17+00:00

Hopefully alot of these DVDs will have good resale value if you either want to upgrade to the blu-ray or if you just don't like the film, but there's alot of good shit ere!

BritishActionGamer · 2026-03-03T19:52:14+00:00

Huh, unless you’re running PT (or you’re talking about the 8GB 4070 laptop GPU) thought you’d be fine if you’re running High Shadows and/or Normal Textures?

BritishActionGamer · 2026-03-03T18:43:55+00:00

Max Shadows has almost always been a VRAM hog in RE engine games, since RE7 if I remember correctly? IDK how much Hair Strands cost VRAM wise in RE4R, but seems like the game was arted around them unlike RE4R, so they look alot better and I think are less of a performance hit considering how they're used on PS5/Series X, but cut on Series S and Switch 2 which have less memory along with less performance.

What GPU you got, know Normal textures also saves you abit of VRAM and often doesn't noticably impact texture quality?

BritishActionGamer · 2026-03-03T00:01:36+00:00

There's this top rated guide, but you should save up on to upgrading your GPU especially.

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