Crimson Desert quenches the Console thirst
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Let battle commence
We are only a week away from the launch of Pearl Abyss’s vast open world, action game, Crimson Desert. The game has been a long time coming, announced back in 2019, it has had a few false dawns but now March 19th 2026 battle commences across PC and consoles. One of the main talking points has been no footage of consoles, specs or modes of how the game will run. With the team bucking the trend of using the commodity-based Unreal Engine 5, instead they have built their own engine, BlackSpace, to deliver the games stunning visuals, vast landscapes, swath of NPC’s and with Ray Tracing included.
I covered the game last year at a Press event and went hands-on with the PC version running on a RX 7800XT AMD GPU. My preview over on IGN is below from that event, and the footage shown was captured by me during the few hours I had with the game. The technical aspects of the engine, visual quality, and how smooth the presentation was impressed me. Even during that almost 12 month old demo, the game looked superb and ran much better than many UE5 games I had tested and reviewed in the years prior and since. Now the guess work can stop on the console and PC requirements and modes8
The game is releasing across all current generation consoles, aside the Switch 2 (for now), and as such the requirements and quality scales heavily across the range of machines. Unsurprisingly, the Xbox Series S offers the lowest settings and modes with only Two modes offered, both without Ray Tracing. Not a surprise as that has become the common choice for all this generation as I noted would likely happen in my preview of the console before it released.
Next is the Xbox Series X and PS5 that offer Three modes, Quality, Performance, with a 40FPS balanced slap bang in the middle. Now though both consoles run Ray Tracing in all of them, and due to the extra Ram and power in the bigger machines, even scale up to High settings in the 30fps Quality mode. As per my preview video above, the engine supports real time dynamic time of day, Ray Traced reflections, Shadows and Global Illumination. The question remains in which of these features are present in the Low and High modes. All three consoles upscale the modes from a lower base resolution using FSR3 and the base and end target differ considerably between all of them. The best of the consoles is the PS5 Pro, which offers the same three modes but boosts the resolutions and Ray Tracing quality in all of them plus enhanced performance is hinting at in the performance and balanced modes. The big change here is the PS5 Pro uses the “upgraded PSSR” aka PSSR2.0 for the performance and quality modes up to 4K outputs. And the Quality mode, which targets 30fps, runs at a native 4K based on the very detailed specifcations released today by Pearl Abyss.
PC has a vast range of hardware to run the game, showing again how versatile the BlackSpace engine is and how well it can scale across hardware. The lowest recommended levels is the 10 year old GTX 1060 which sports 6GB of Vram, alonfside an equally dated Ryzen 5 2600X. Back in 2018 when it launched this 6 core, 12 thread CPU was not setting the world alight and thus the level it can drop to is impressive. But to get the console level quality and performance the requirements do step up to the Radeon RX 6500 XT or Geforce RTX 2080 which achieves the Low or Medium settings which are likely close to the Xbox Series S and Performance modes on the PS5 and Xbox Series X. All the modes and specs for consoles, PC, Mac and the Asus Rog Handheld (yes!) can be seen below.
So the stage it set for a contendor for game of the year in 1 weeks time, the brand new engine and range of features and scalability offered does present quite a challenge for the industry at large. If this new, South Korean gaming studio can come out so strong, so impressive and with their own rolled technology. One that is compering with the likes of Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed series, CD Projekt Red Witcher 3 and their now discontinued Red Engine. But also the establised Unreal Engine 5 that often struggles at large scale, open world games. The gaming landscape may look very different come the end of 2026, be sure to check back on our YouTube channel and website around launch for the full console and PC technical deep dive coverage on this Gaelic inspired medievil adventure.
