I’ve always found Dune: Awakening an oddball concept – it’s been repeatedly made clear, by Zendaya no less, that Arrakis will immediately kill, flay, and digest anyone who pokes a toe into its sands without an impossible sci-fi techsuit and a lifetime of edged weapons training. Not, you’d suspect, an obvious setting for a survival crafting game where genre conventions demand you begin life as some naked loser picking up sticks.
And yet, Awakening has turned out alright, hoisting desert exploration and ominous sci-fi atmospherics above the tedious 24/7 resource gathering that has choked out certain peers. PC performance is workable too, with enough concessions towards low-end rigs, though it’s not crysknife-sharp either: some technical mishaps need a prompt patching, while Unreal Engine 5 is up to its usual stuttering nonsense.
Dune: Awakening also exhibits another, less visible quirk of UE5: a graphics settings menu that makes it difficult to boost performance beyond blindingly obvious changes, like employing DLSS or switching off ray tracing-adjacent Lumen effects. You’ll find my blindingly obvious settings guide below, after a look at how this crafty MMO fares on various hardware.
Dune: Awakening system requirements and PC performance
I have no idea why this game needs an additional 15GB of SSD space for recommended performance. Still, at least that’s the only questionable aspect of Awakening’s official specs. All the CPU, memory, and for once, graphics card requirements are all pretty reasonable, with the GPUs in particular matching expectations in my testing.
Dune: Awakening minimum PC specs
- OS: Windows 10 64-bit or newer
- CPU: Intel Core i5-7400 / AMD Ryzen 3 1200
- RAM: 16GB
- GPU: Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB / AMD Radeon 5600 XT
- DirectX version: 12
- Storage: 60GB, SSD required
Dune: Awakening recommended PC specs
- OS: Windows 10 64-bit or newer
- CPU: Intel Core i7-10700K / AMD Ryzen 5 2600X
- RAM: 16GB
- GPU: NVIDIA RTX 3070 / AMD Radeon 6700 XT
- DirectX version: 12
- Storage: 75GB, SSD required
The GTX 1060, for example, averaged 36fps at 1080p by combining the Low quality preset with Quality-mode FSR upscaling. Using native-resolution TAA, that dropped to 29fps, but for a rock-bottom spec card the upscaled result ain’t too bad. The recommend-tier RTX 3070, meanwhile, managed 59fps at native 1080p on the Ultra preset – and with Quality DLSS, almost matched that at 1440p, scoring 58fps.
Vindication for Funcom’s estimates, then, and Awakening seems to scale quite handily on newer GPUs too. At 1080p, the relatively humble RTX 4060 produced 50fps on Ultra and 61fps on High – not on the RTX 3070’s level, but still quick enough to avoid upscaling if that’s what you prefer. Higher resolutions don’t block off higher framerates, either: the RTX 4070 Ti was enough for a slick 95fps at 1440p, using both Ultra settings and Quality DLSS, and the same card still managed 60fps after a switch to 4K. The newer RTX 5080 is also a good fit for this rez, averaging 81fps with Ultra and DLSS Quality.
Back in Budgetsville, even the Steam Deck can keep up, thanks in part to an “experimental” Low End Laptop toggle accessible through the graphics options. A kind of lower-than-low mode, this does make the lighting and shadow effects look a bit mobile gamey, but performance on the Steam Deck is impressive – I typically got anywhere between 35fps and 55fps, depending on on-screen bustle, and that was after manually adjusting the upscaling from Ultra Performance XeSS to the far sharper-looking Quality FSR.
It’s certainly nice to see a modern, big-money game not being so precious about the need for visual compromises on affordable hardware. That said, there are some places where it could use a little extra polishing. Bugs, for one thing, aren’t uncommon. After barely an hour on Arrakis I awoke from a spice dream to find my vision completely blackened, able to move and interact but not see anything. Come on Funcom, that’s the opposite of what spice does. Minutes later, having quit and rejoined a server, I spawned into an out-of-bounds void that left me floating helplessly until I relogged a second time.
DLSS 4 frame generation is also broken, at least on the RTX 5080 I tested it with. Both its 2x and 4x settings did add some extra frames, but with an inexplicable cap of 95fps, an underwhelming increase from the 81fps I’d previously recorded without them (and, in the case of 4x, at the cost of some truly sinful input lag). I have a feeling that this may be another RTX 50 series issue, as 2x frame generation worked much better on both the RTX 4070 Ti and RTX 4060, with the latter jumping from 77fps with only DLSS Quality upscaling to 115fps with frame gen. But in any case, that’s another blip that needs fixing.
Lastly, we have the UE5 special: regular, often quite heavy stuttering, regardless of overall frame rates and especially prevalent when exploring new areas. Which, given how eager Dune: Awakening is to prod you away from the safety of your base, happens a lot. These micro-interruptions therefore rarely let up, and can often kick in at the least convenient of times, like when you’re dangling off a cliff face with 5% stamina left to work with, or when trying to line up a (hilariously long-ranged) knee charge against an attacking bandit.
I think at this point, most of us have jittered our way through one stuttering Unreal game or another. Yet it feels particularly disappointing here as the game gets a lot else right in its approach to performance, from its handheld-friendly potato mode to the ease with which higher-end PCs can balance fancy effects with silky framerates. Alas.
Dune: Awakening best settings guide
There’s no means of overcoming this stutter, but it’s still worth fiddling with the visual settings. Not least because the presets – Ultra, High, Medium, and Low – all try to force on not just upscaling, but DLSS or FSR frame generation as well. And that, as the RTX 5080 demonstrated, has mixed results.
At the same time, there’s no point fine-tuning every individual setting in the list, because – as has been the case with numerous games in recent years, UE5 ones especially – a lot of them won’t affect performance one way or the other, unless you’re on the weakest or oldest of PC gear. Using my RTX 4060 to test each setting’s framerate impact, even the usual suspects like shadow quality, foliage quality, and view distance performed about the same on Ultra as they did on Low.
The big exceptions were GI (Global Illumination) quality and, by extension, the Enable Lumen setting. Running GI on Ultra automatically enables Lumen, UE5’s built-in ray tracing equivalent, so simply lowering that is an easy way to bag loads of free frames. Remember how the RTX 4060 averaged 50fps at 1080p/Ultra (with upscaling/frame gen disabled)? That became 76fps with GI quality on Low, and 72fps with it on Medium.
The other big frames producer is, unsurprisingly, upscaling. This is a no-brainer at 1440p and above anyway, though even at 1080p, it’s viable so long as you stick to the higher quality settings. Specifically, DLSS is worth using if you have the Nvidia GPU to support it. Otherwise, I’d suggest TSR over FSR, as while the former is narrowly slower – 73fps on the RTX 4060 versus FSR’s 74fps, both on equivalent quality settings – TSR looks crisper and cleaner when upscaling to 1080p.
Now for what I just said, but in list form:
- Motion blur: Off
- Override upscaling preset: On
- Upscaling method/Upscaling quality/Resolution scale: DLSS on Quality, or TSR on 67 rez scale
- Frame generation method: Off
- GI quality: Medium
- Enable Lumen: Off (this should set itself after dropping GI quality)
- Everything else: Ultra preset equivalent
A quick benchmark with these settings got the RTX 4060 averaging 86fps – not just a huge jump up from the 50fps I was getting with Ultra quality and native 1080p, but very close to the 89fps that the same GPU got from using Low settings. Again, a lot of that is just upscaling, but the visual quality of these tools has progressed to the point where we don’t need to be quite as fearful of deploying them outside of the highest resolutions.
As for frame generation, I don’t think it’s necessary even when it works properly, though the flipside of that is how higher organic framerates reduce the latency impact when frame gen is applied on top. With the ongoing caveat that DLSS 4 broke on my RTX 5080, I will say it performed much better on the RTX 4060, further bumping that new 86fps average up to 137fps – without any serious visual problems or excessive latency. If generated frames are your jam, feel free to at least test it out for yourself.
That’s all from me, but other RPS-based Dune: Awakening guides are available, including Jeremy’s character creator overview, trainer locations guide, and water scavenging tips.