Crimson Desert looks really pretty, but you can make the game world much more atmospheric. However, the better atmosphere significantly impacts your performance. In our tests, we found that both AMD and Nvidia graphics cards are equally affected.
Crimson Desert is arguably one of the prettiest games in recent years, even though it consciously avoids using the Unreal Engine and relies on a proprietary engine.
However, the game gains significantly more atmosphere when you activate a setting in the game. This gain is accompanied by high performance losses.
Raytracing is a huge boon for the atmosphere, but it eats your FPS
What setting is this about? Specifically, it refers to the setting of Raytracing and FSR Ray Generation (AMD) / DLSS Ray Reconstruction (Nvidia). If you skip Ray Generation/Reconstruction, a custom system from Pearl Abyss is used for Raytracing.
If you use the feature, your game will look significantly prettier and more detailed. However, this also requires a corresponding graphics card: For Nvidia, this includes all RTX cards from the 2000 generation, and for AMD, all cards from the RX 6000 series and better. If you barely meet the minimum requirements of Crimson Desert (RX 5500 XT / GTX 1060), Raytracing is not available to you.
Where is this particularly noticeable? In interiors, because here the lighting is particularly well realized: Objects like armor or people cast precise shadows, and light is correctly refracted when it shines through windows. Furniture appears much more three-dimensional due to the detailed shadow casting. Metal looks like metal and no longer like a painted block of wood.
This makes the game feel much more atmospheric: The world appears much more natural and realistic.
During the day, this is less noticeable, as the shadows and lighting are not as pronounced: The shadows on a rock wall or under a tree become slightly darker, and the surrounding areas become slightly brighter. In enclosed spaces, however, you have clearly defined light sources such as torches, lanterns, or sunlight coming through the windows.
Check out the image galleries in this article. You can see the differences clearly:
What is the disadvantage? You lose significant performance, and the FPS sometimes drops drastically. At MeinMMO, we tested this on different systems, once with AMD and once with NVIDIA. Both with a Radeon RX 9070 and a GeForce RTX 4080, the FPS in WQHD with FSR Ray Generation / DLSS Ray Reconstruction noticeably drop: from 80/90 FPS to about 30/35 FPS. You therefore lose more than half of your performance.
This is just about the threshold of what I would define as fluid gameplay.
However, if you skip Ray Generation / Ray Construction, you miss out on details regarding shadows and lighting, but your game still looks better than if you skip Raytracing entirely, and your performance remains stable enough.
In the end, you have to decide what is more important to you: fluid gameplay or a stunning, natural game world that you can’t get enough of. I ultimately consciously chose the better performance because 30 FPS is simply not enough for me in everyday use.
My recommendation: Activate Raytracing (assuming the appropriate GPU) and skip Ray Generation / Ray Reconstruction and use the internal function of Crimson Desert’s own engine. Yes, you will lose details, but the game still looks better, and the performance doesn’t drop as drastically.
Crimson Desert is an action-adventure with role-playing elements and an open world. It comes from the developers of Black Desert and is set to be released in March 2026. MeinMMO tells you everything about the release date, editions, trailers, and more: Crimson Desert: Release, Trailer, Demo, and Editions – All Information about the RPG Hope for 2026
