Overview
Crimson Desert runs on Pearl Abyss's proprietary BlackSpace Engine, which delivers stunning visuals through ray-traced global illumination, stochastic path tracing, and real-time color bleeding. The engine is well-optimized; even upper-midrange GPUs can maintain 60 FPS at 4K on the Ultra preset. However, choosing the right combination of settings for your hardware can mean the difference between a smooth 60+ FPS experience and frustrating stutters.
This guide provides specific setting recommendations for three hardware tiers, addresses the noise/artifacting issues some players encounter, and explains the upscaling options. For a detailed reference of all available options, see Performance and Graphics Settings.
Display Settings (All Tiers)
Setting | Recommendation | Notes |
|---|---|---|
Screen Mode | Borderless | Allows easy Alt-Tab and overlay access without performance penalty. |
Resolution | Your monitor's native resolution | Do not lower this manually; use upscaling instead. |
V-Sync | Off | Use the in-game or driver frame rate limiter instead to reduce input lag. |
Frame Rate Limiter | Match your monitor's refresh rate | Capping at 60, 120, or 144 prevents unnecessary GPU strain. |
Upscaling: DLSS vs FSR
Crimson Desert supports NVIDIA DLSS 4.5, DLSS 4.0, DLAA, and AMD FSR Redstone (FSR 4.0). Choosing the right upscaler is one of the most impactful decisions for both image quality and performance.
Upscaler | Recommendation | Details |
|---|---|---|
DLSS 4.0 (Quality) | Best for NVIDIA RTX 40/50 Series | Produces a cleaner image than DLSS 4.5 with less noise in the current build. Use Quality preset for minimal quality loss. |
DLSS 4.5 (Preset M/L) | Avoid for now | Produces noticeably more noise and artifacts compared to DLSS 4.0. Wait for a patch. |
DLAA | Best image quality for RTX users at native resolution | Deep Learning Anti-Aliasing at native resolution. No upscaling, so no performance gain, but the cleanest possible image. |
FSR 4.0 (Quality) | Best for AMD Radeon RX 9000 Series | AMD's latest AI-driven upscaler. Use Quality preset for the best balance. |
FSR 3.1 (Balanced) | Fallback for older AMD GPUs | Use Balanced preset if your GPU does not support FSR 4.0. |
Frame Generation | Enable if available | Adds AI-generated intermediate frames. Works with both DLSS and FSR. Significant FPS boost with minimal input lag. |
Recommended Settings: High-End PCs
Target: 4K at 60+ FPS or 1440p at 100+ FPS. Hardware: RTX 5070 Ti / 4080 or better, RX 9070 XT or better, 16 GB RAM, SSD.
Setting | Value |
|---|---|
Model Quality | Ultra |
Texture Quality | Cinematic (12 GB+ VRAM) or Ultra (8-10 GB VRAM) |
Shadow Quality | Ultra |
Ray Tracing | On |
Lighting Quality | Ultra |
Reflection Quality | Ultra |
Advanced Weather Effects | On |
Water Quality | Ultra |
Foliage Density | High |
Volumetric Fog Quality | Ultra |
Effect Quality | Cinematic |
Simulation Quality | Ultra |
Post-Processing Quality | Cinematic |
Upscale Mode | DLSS 4.0 Quality / FSR 4.0 Quality |
Ray Reconstruction | On (NVIDIA only) |
Ray Regeneration | Off (see note below) |
Note on Lighting Quality: Lighting Quality is the single most impactful setting in Crimson Desert. It controls global illumination resolution, indirect lighting quality, and reflection fidelity. Ultra provides roughly 9 to 10% better performance than Cinematic with only minor visual differences. Unless you have a flagship GPU, stick with Ultra over Cinematic.
Recommended Settings: Mid-Range PCs
Target: 1440p at 60 FPS or 1080p at 100+ FPS. Hardware: RTX 4060 Ti / 5060, RX 7800 XT / 9070, 16 GB RAM, SSD.
Setting | Value |
|---|---|
Model Quality | High |
Texture Quality | High (8 GB VRAM) or Ultra (10 GB+ VRAM) |
Shadow Quality | High |
Ray Tracing | On |
Lighting Quality | High |
Reflection Quality | Ultra |
Advanced Weather Effects | On |
Water Quality | Ultra |
Foliage Density | High |
Volumetric Fog Quality | High |
Effect Quality | High |
Simulation Quality | Ultra |
Post-Processing Quality | High |
Upscale Mode | DLSS 4.0 Balanced / FSR Balanced |
Ray Reconstruction | On (NVIDIA only) |
Ray Regeneration | Off |
Why keep Ray Tracing on? Crimson Desert was designed with ray tracing in mind. The performance hit from enabling it is surprisingly small (often under 5%), and the visual improvement is significant. Disabling it does not fully resolve noise issues, so leaving it on is generally the better tradeoff.
Recommended Settings: Low-End PCs
Target: 1080p at 60 FPS. Hardware: RTX 3060 / 4060, RX 6700 XT / 7600, 16 GB RAM, SSD.
Setting | Value |
|---|---|
Model Quality | Low |
Texture Quality | High (6 GB VRAM) or Medium (4 GB VRAM) |
Shadow Quality | High |
Ray Tracing | Off |
Lighting Quality | High |
Reflection Quality | High |
Advanced Weather Effects | Off |
Water Quality | High |
Foliage Density | Low |
Volumetric Fog Quality | High |
Effect Quality | High |
Simulation Quality | High |
Post-Processing Quality | Medium |
Upscale Mode | DLSS Performance / FSR Performance |
Frame Generation | On (if supported) |
Key savings: Model Quality set to Low gives approximately a 9% performance boost. Reducing Foliage Density to Low has a noticeable impact during outdoor exploration. Turning off Advanced Weather Effects removes rare weather event rendering that rarely affects gameplay. Shadow Quality below High causes visible flickering and blur, so High is the minimum recommendation.
Fixing Noise and Artifacting
The most common visual complaint in Crimson Desert is image noise, particularly in dimly lit interiors, shadowed areas, and during certain weather effects. This noise is a byproduct of the stochastic path tracing system used by the BlackSpace Engine.
Steps to Reduce Noise
Set Lighting Quality to Ultra or Cinematic. Lower settings reduce the sample count for indirect lighting, which directly increases visible noise. Ultra is the sweet spot for performance and quality.
Use DLSS 4.0 instead of DLSS 4.5. DLSS 4.0 produces a cleaner, less noisy image in the current build. DLSS 4.5 introduces additional artifacts in some scenes.
Enable Ray Reconstruction (NVIDIA). Combining DLSS 4.0 Performance mode with Ray Reconstruction is the ideal setup for minimizing noise. Note: Ray Reconstruction has a known bug where it can remove rain effects from the game.
Do not disable Ray Tracing to fix noise. Counter-intuitively, turning off Ray Tracing does not fix noise issues. The noise persists because it originates from the global illumination system, not from ray-traced reflections specifically.
Set Blur Intensity to 0. This removes motion blur that can compound the visual noise, giving a cleaner image during movement.
Avoid FSR Ray Regeneration for now. Both NVIDIA Ray Reconstruction and AMD Ray Regeneration add significant GPU load (40 to 50% performance hit). Ray Regeneration also introduces subtle geometry changes beyond noise reduction, making it less predictable.
Mac Settings
The macOS version of Crimson Desert uses Apple MetalFX for upscaling, frame generation, and denoising. M3 and M4 family chips support hardware-accelerated ray tracing and mesh shading. For best results on Mac:
Use the Low-End PC settings table as a baseline.
Disable Ray Tracing unless you have an M4 Pro or M4 Max chip.
Set Foliage Density to Low or Medium.
Enable MetalFX Upscaling at the Balanced or Performance preset.
Enable MetalFX Frame Generation for smoother frame rates.
Known Issues
Issue | Status | Workaround |
|---|---|---|
Object pop-in at high speed | Known, no fix available | Occurs even at maximum settings due to VRAM streaming optimization. Lowering traversal speed slightly reduces the frequency. |
Ray Reconstruction removes rain | Confirmed bug | Disable Ray Reconstruction during rainy weather if you want to see rain effects, or wait for a patch. |
DLSS 4.5 introduces noise | Known issue | Use DLSS 4.0 instead until a game or driver update resolves the issue. |
Interior shadow artifacts | Affects lower lighting settings | Set Lighting Quality to Ultra or higher to resolve. |
GPU Benchmark Reference
The following benchmark data from TechSpot's 40-GPU test provides a reference for expected performance at different resolutions on the High preset.
GPU | 1080p High (Avg FPS) | 1440p High (Avg FPS) | 4K High (Avg FPS) |
|---|---|---|---|
RTX 5090 | 188 (CPU limited) | ~160 | ~100 |
RTX 4090 | 166 | ~145 | ~95 |
RTX 5070 Ti / 4080 Super | ~130 | ~110 | ~70 |
RX 7900 XTX / 9070 XT | ~125 | ~110 | ~65 |
RTX 5060 Ti / 4070 | ~100 | ~80 | ~50 |
RTX 5060 / 4060 Ti | ~80 | ~60 | ~35 |
RX 7600 / RTX 4060 | ~60 | ~45 | ~25 |
These numbers represent the High preset without upscaling. With DLSS or FSR at Quality mode, expect a 30 to 50% improvement in frame rates. Frame Generation can approximately double the displayed frame rate at the cost of slight input lag.