Crimson Desert – 1st Look NXG Technical Review

20/03/2026 Michael Thompson

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Crimson Desert Falls into PS5

Pearl Abyss have made a BIG impression with Crimson Desert, built on their own Black Space Engine technology that offers Ray Tracing, Parallax Occlusion Mapping(PoM) using Displacement maps, adative tesselation on grounds, buildings, vast NPC count within an open world, some of the best water physics in game and it even supports 4K/30 and 40fps modes and even beyond with 120Hz screens and VRR. After my first few hours with the game I wanted to get my first look, Randon Access, analysis up on the base PS5 version which is likely to be the most played, outside of the PC market. So first, things first, the numbers game and some problems I have seen online regards that 120Hz mode.

Check your Screen and PS5 settings

I have seen issues online with the way the game defaults to a 120hz output, irrespctive of the mode you chose to play of the 3 available (Quality, Balanced or Performance). And this can affect some players that have a TV that does not support HDM 2.1 inputs which are required for a 4K/120Hz input.Many TV’s have modes in their menus that can use enhanced inputs which HDMI2.1 requires. Ensure this is enabled and that your TV supports 120Hz at 4K, also check that your cable can support the same 40Gbps requirements of the PS5 at this level (The PS5 will drop from true RGB to 422 or 420 if required to hit that high refresh and resolution) This is found and can be forced in the PS5 Screen menu by choosing Automatic or -1 (422) or -2(420) as shown below. Make sure if you have a TV that DOES not support 4K/120 you either confirm 1440p/120 is supported and use that, or disable the 120Hz output (change Automatic to off) and the game will then revert to 4K/60 for all modes, negating the balanced mode sadly.

How many digits am I holding up?

So the all important next question is how does it look, run and play. Well the team released the games mode main details last week as I covered then, and after playing and pixel peeping I can confirm that they were fully transparent. Quality mode targets 4K output and is upscaled to that level from a 2560x1440p base using FSR3. This mode also runs at 30fps, but the game offers a V-sync off option in the menu, rare for consoles, and this is supposed to enable Variable Refresh Rate but it currrently appears broken in this Day 1 patched version. As even with a VRR screen and capture card, the game still just tears in all modes. I have already seen that some YouTube channels with incorrect tools for frame rate analysis have fallen foul of this and are presenting widly incorrect and excagerted frame times. My video for performance and technology will be up soon, but right now the quality mode is the closest to its target.

Next we have Balanced mode (so long as you have a 120Hz screen) and this offers the same 4K FSR3 output but now lowers the base resolution down, (Edit:- I misread my own notes, Balanced slices 30% of the Quality mode base resolution, down to an approximate 2240x1260p (Balanced in AMD FSR3 settings) and also drops some settings, such as Ray Traced Global Illumination and Ambient occlusion. The benefit is the game can now target the mean ground between 30fps and 60fps, 40fps or really 25ms rather than 33ms of 30fps. And here the game starts to show some issues on performance, with it often dropping frames below that target, specifically when large numbers of NPCs, dense towns and fast travel are happening. Leaving us with a mid 30s read out at many sections even when not in dense towns. Although the games asset quality, textures, models and Image Quality is very good in both modes, FSR3 signs and weaknesses are obvious, heavy ghosting happens on fast motion, over hands moving against Kliff’s body or people running past dense foliage. Sub-Pixel shimmer on AI, edges of rocks and reflections, be they Screen Spaced or Ray Traced, all happen often enough to counter the clean, sharp and bright image both the Quality and Balanced mode deliver.

Finally the Performance mode, and the lofty aspirations of 60fps make some vast cuts to the games visuals. Ray Tracing is all but culled, being very noisy, unstable and rife with errors (something that can happen in Balance mode also when changing modes and not restarting the game). Model quality is severly culled reducing geometric complexity, Shadows, Ambient Occlusion, Tesselation, PoM and more are all reduced heavily. But the biggest is resolution with it now dropping to a native 1920x1080p output, with some TAA in place. But the numbers do not reflect the sheer imapct this has on Image Quality, with textures, faces, sub pixel details, trees, shrubs, particles and more all becoming very blurry, hard to pick out details and smeared due to the undersampling of all these elements below the target resolution output. Which makes this mode a hard sell, even for those that want a 60fps mode, making matters worse is the game rarely hands-in a consistent 16ms frame time. With it often bouncing back and forth from 16 to 33ms like a game of Pong. It can also have streaming stutter and in general appears CPU bound quite often in the game, likely from the dynamic NPC interaction, animation, path finding and more happening at all times. But this mode is mostly GPU and/or memory bound which is obvious in some of the performance issues noted. Another area is this mode seems to be overly dark and this many assetsm textures and lighting appear incorrect. Take these spinning wheels in the temple early in the game, in performance mode only the illuminated centre can be seen, but in balanced and quality mode, the stone wheel is now visible. Making me thing this mode was added as a last minute option on PS5 and Series X to deliver a 60fps mode. But I expect in the coming weeks and months, patches will drop that will improve this modes visuals and performance and I feel an FSR3 1440p Target from a 720P based with some other optimisations may be the best balance for the performance mode.