Crimson Desert was one of the most anticipated games set to launch in 2026 and after years of waiting, it’s finally out on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. We gave it a 7 out of 10 in the Game Informer Crimson Desert review, and you can read that to learn more about our impressions of this RPG as a whole, but given the breadth of its vast open world, we also wanted to break down how it runs on consoles.
If you’re interested in how the game runs on PC, well, to keep it short, that’s the best place to play Crimson Desert. But that’s not necessarily surprising, especially for third-party games such as this. If you have a beefy PC, you can make Crimson Desert shine, and given the game’s wide-ranging optimization on PC, there’s a good chance the game will still look good even with an older graphics card. It’s more challenging to determine how well a game runs on PC, given the wide variation in PCs from player to player, whether it’s video cards, CPUs, or something else. That’s the appeal of console gaming – games are (usually) good to go out of the box, per se, and don’t require the tinkering that comes with playing on PC.
As such, my colleague and Game Informer executive editor Kyle Hilliard and I are writing up this story here to tell you how the game runs on consoles. You can read my PlayStation 5 Pro impressions below, and Kyle’s Xbox Series X impressions beneath that.
Crimson Desert PlayStation 5 Pro Performance
I’ll describe my time with the game’s performance here, but if you’re here for a quick look, the gallery above features a screenshot, taken at the same time and spot in the game, in Performance mode, Balanced mode, and Quality mode. Obviously, a big aspect of these various modes is the FPS of Crimson Desert, but that doesn’t come through in screenshots so these images should give you an idea of the resolution of the game in each mode. For reference, Performance mode is 1080p, Balanced is 1440p, and Quality is 4K.
Furthermore, the Performance mode runs at 1080p/60FPS, Balanced at 1440p/40FPS, and Quality at 4K/30FPS.
I’ve toyed around with each setting and I’ll say this: VRR seems quite necessary to enjoy this game at its best. Regardless of the mode, but especially in Performance and Balanced, when I turned VRR off, there was a great deal of screen tearing. Even in low-population areas, the screen tearing was apparent. As such, if you have a TV with VRR (I am using an LG C-model OLED TV), you should absolutely play with it on. With that on, the screen tearing disappears, naturally.
Performance Mode – Crimson Desert on PS5 Pro
However, screen tearing aside, I noticed a lot of environmental pop-in in the mid-range of your view at any given time on screen in Performance and Balanced mode. In Quality mode, pop-in was reduced to essentially zero. In the other two modes, though, there is a distracting amount of foliage pop-in and an even more distracting amount of terrain load-in. It’s quite odd in that the mountainous rocks didn’t necessarily pop in out of nowhere, but they almost morphed onto the screen. The resulting effect is a very jarring experience. I liken it to noticing something moving out of the corner of your eye – you’re watching Kliff, the main character, from a third-person perspective, so your attention is on him, but in your periphery, you’ll see a lot of movement in the cliffs of mountains, the leaves of forests, etc. I don’t like it.
I tried turning off 120Hz mode on my TV because I’ve seen some online suggest doing that to enhance your picture, but, truthfully, it changed very little for me. It might have sharpened the image up a bit (I won’t pretend to know why), but my main issue with the visuals – the pop-in – remained. It’s unfortunate because the 60FPS of the Performance mode, and the 40FPS of the Balanced mode, are actually quite stable in the game’s opening hours. That said, I have read online that the FPS struggles to remain stable in more populated areas of the game, such as robust city villages and large-scale battles.
Balanced Mode – Crimson Desert PS5 Pro
With all this taken into account, the best mode for now seems to be Quality mode, with a well-implemented 4K resolution and a stable 30FPS. Unfortunately, 30 FPS isn’t the move for an action game like this, so ultimately this is a lose-lose situation for me. I can, of course, get over the pop-in of Performance and Balanced as I’ve certainly done it for games before (ahem, Pokémon Violet), but it’s obviously not ideal and further proof that this game was probably optimized for PCs first before anything else. Developer Pearl Abyss has already released a patch to address some visual issues, so I suspect the game will be running better in a month than it is today.
Quality Mode – Crimson Desert PS5 Pro
To sum up my thoughts: there’s nothing particularly atrocious about the game’s visual issues, but there’s no obvious choice for which mode to play in. It depends on what you favor and prefer in open-world single-player RPGs: gorgeous resolution with a stable but lower framerate (Quality), or a higher framerate with blurrier resolution but lots of strange artifacting and pop-in (Performance or Balanced).
Crimson Desert Xbox Series X Performance
On Xbox Series X, much of the issues outlined above persist on Microsoft’s platform. In a complimentary way, the game seems to have parity on Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 Pro based on comparing Wes and I’s experiences.
Like the PlayStation 5 Pro screenshots, the gallery above similarly showcases screenshots taken at the same spot in the game in Performance, Balanced, and Quality mode in that order.
I also saw improvements when toggling on the VRR setting, but compared to Wes’ PlayStation experience, I didn’t encounter much screen tearing. Environmental pop-in, however, was a distracting issue. But not nearly as distracting as protagonist Kliff’s beard. On any of the settings, but especially Performance (more or less my universal setting of choice when given the option), Kliff’s beard and other elements of fur and hair look fractured and low-resolution.
But far and away my biggest issue was the noticeable lag time between pressing a button and seeing that action performed on-screen. Scrolling through menus is particularly slow and the few combat encounters I engaged in became less about pulling off combos and expert blocking and more about tapping RB to swing my sword as much as possible and hoping the enemy would die before I did. It felt like I was issuing battle commands to a Pokémon more than engaging with combat myself.
Crimson Desert on Xbox Series X/S. Don’t look too closely at the beard.
The game, however, does look impressive in moments where you stop and taking it in. The screenshots above were taken from a moment when an NPC encourages you to slow down and take a look at the view. And when the environment did finish popping in, I fully admit being impressed by how far in the distance I could see and how great it looked.
Like Wes wrote above, Developer Pearl Abyss is already patching both the console and PC versions of the game to address some visual issues. It’s fair to hope that even in the coming weeks, the game will be running and looking better. But it seems, for the moment at least, PC, unsurprisingly, is going to be your best bet if you have the rig to handle it.