Focus Entertainment has released Atomic Heart on PC. Powered by Unreal Engine 4, it’s time now to benchmark it and see how it performs on the PC platform.
For this PC Performance Analysis, we used an Intel i9 9900K, 16GB of DDR4 at 3800Mhz, AMD’s Radeon RX580, RX Vega 64, RX 6900XT, RX 7900XTX, NVIDIA’s GTX980Ti, RTX 2080Ti, RTX 3080 and RTX 4090. We also used Windows 10 64-bit, the GeForce 528.49 and the Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition 23.2.1 drivers.
Mundfish has added a lot of graphics settings to tweak. PC gamers can adjust the quality of Animations, Textures, Ambient Occlusion, Materials, Volumetric Fog and more. The game also supports DLSS 2/3, as well as FSR. Moreover, it will compile its shaders the first time you launch it. As we’ve already reported, the game also does not feature any Ray Tracing effects at launch. Not only that, but there is no FOV slider (though the developers have confirmed that they will add one via a post-launch update).
Atomic Heart does not feature any built-in benchmark tool. Thus, for both our CPU and GPU benchmarks, we used the scene in which you first use your Scanner. This scene was one of the most GPU-heavy ones we could find, so it should give us a pretty good idea of how the rest of the game will run.
In order to find out how the game scales on multiple CPU threads, we simulated a dual-core, a quad-core and a hexa-core CPU. Surprisingly enough, our simulated dual-core system was able to push constant 60fps at 1080p/Max Settings. There were some hiccups without Hyper-Threading. However, when we enabled HT, we were able to get more stable performance. As for the rest of the CPU configurations, our octa-core and simulated hexa-core performed similarly. From the looks of it, the game can effectively take advantage of 6 CPU cores.
At 1080p/Max Settings, our top five GPUs were able to provide a constant 60fps experience. The AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 came close to it, though there were drops to 51fps. By simply dropping some settings, PC gamers will be able to maintain 60fps on that GPU. Moreover, the AMD Radeon RX 6900XT was able to match the performance of the NVIDIA RTX4090 at 1080p. The RX 7900XTX was also able to beat NVIDIA’s high-end GPU. Yeap, this is another game in which NVIDIA’s DX12 driver brings a significant CPU overhead. At least we’re looking at really high framerates (over 150fps) so this won’t really trouble most PC gamers. We should also note that the minimum framerates are when using the Scanner, and those scenes were GPU-heavy. Below you can see the RTX 4090 being pushed to its limits at 1080p.
At 1440p/Max Settings, our top four GPUs had no trouble at all pushing framerates higher than 60fps at all times. And as for native 4K/Max Settings, the RX 6900XT, RX 7900XTX and RTX4090 were able to offer a constant 60fps experience. The NVIDIA RTX 3080 can also offer a smooth gaming experience, provided you use a G-Sync/FreeSync monitor.
Graphics-wise, Atomic Heart looks amazing. Even without its Ray Tracing effects, Atomic Heart is among the most beautiful FPS games. The environments look amazing, and Mundfish has used numerous high-quality textures. The game can also push a lot of characters on screen with ease. My only gripe with Atomic Heart is its limited draw distance. Even on Max Settings, the game has noticeable pop-in issues (for both characters and environments).
All in all, Atomic Heart looks and performs great on PC. Despite using Unreal Engine 4, the game does not suffer from any major stuttering issues. And, to be honest, this game (which comes from a new studio) puts to shame all other developers that are using UE4. The fact that RTX40 owners can enable DLSS 3 in order to further improve performance is the icing in the cake. Yes, it’s a shame that Atomic Heart does not have its advertised Ray Tracing effects. However, it still looks great and runs smoothly on numerous PC configurations!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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as long as only empress can crack denuvo and it looks like it takes her 3 weeks to do it so yeah, it’s better to have denuvo on your games than not have it. You get at least 3 weeks of sales and if you keep adding dlc not every update gets cracked.
Look at AC Valhalla, there hasn’t been a new crack in 2 years i think, 2 years of big updates that are unavailable. So denuvo does it’s job.
And it looks like it doesn’t impact performance that much, at least here. We cannot fault Mundfish or the publisher for adding denuvo. I wonder how much it cost
Denuvo is a mixed bag. there has been concrete evidence from a lot of different titles where the pre-crack and post crack versions of the game run differently with the Dennuvo version running worse.
At best it will not impact performance, but at worst it will cause stuttering due to high disk and CPU usage.
You on a website that literary tests Denuvo builds vs Normal builds, and there was never any evidence of Denuvo affecting performance.
There have been poor implementations of Denuvo in the past, but that is due to incompetent developers, they were eventually fixed anyway.
You probably didn’t even bother to read this same article, where NVidia CPU overhead is evident, so it has nothing to do with Denuvo.
“there was never any evidence of Denuvo affecting performance.” You should do your research before making such easily refutable claims. Especially when you’re accusing others of the same. A quick search of “Denuvo” on this website contradicts this.
We are indeed on a website that tests Denuvo. And DSOG has found a performance impact with Denuvo across several titles: Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Humankind, Tekken 7 and a few others. Many other YouTube videos show a difference in other titles.
Like I said previously, if it’s done right it can have no performance impact. But there is never a scenario where it will improve performance (live decryption of a game executable isn’t free computationally).
“there was never any evidence of Denuvo affecting performance.” You should do your research before making such easily refutable claims. Especially when you’re accusing others of the same.
https://www.dsogaming.com/news/shadow-of-the-tomb-raider-runs-noticeably-faster-without-denuvo/
We are indeed on a website that tests Denuvo. And DSOG has found a performance impact with Denuvo across several titles: Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Humankind, Tekken 7 and a few others. Many other YouTube videos show a difference in other titles.
Like I said previously, if it’s done right it can have no performance impact. But there is never a scenario where it will improve performance (live decryption of a game executable isn’t free computationally).
€140 000 for the first 12 months of “protection” and a lot of dislikes. Was it worth it chap?
Yes definitely worth it for that low money are you kidding.
Not what I was asking. It kinda flew over your head but meh
That’s assuming DRM increase sales, which is unproven.
No it’s not. If the game is bad it will do bad with or without drm, if it’s good then drm will help it sell more during launch.
citation needed.
I think pirates have higher attention spam and low time preference compared to your average consumer, they can wait 3 weeks or even 2 years or not bother with DLC’s and updates to an already bloated game.
Yeah ok so let them wait. Right now as a pirate I can’t get Valhalla with all dlcs. And it’s been more than 2 years since it released. So how is this worse for Ubisoft than having the game cracked day 1 ? It’s not and it also proves drm has a benefit for the devs.
“It’s not and it also proves drm has a benefit for the devs.”
Can you quantify this “benefit”? If it is just about preventing pirates from playing the DLC, fine, but in terms of sales it’s not quite clear, maybe someone gave up and bought the game and maybe someone said “screw it”, and decided to not buy because of it.
It’s common sense and if it wasn’t the case nobody will do it. If you think having your game available for free at launch isn’t worse for sales than only having it be available to buy you’re either ignorant or disingenuous
Would i be asking you this question if it was common sense?
“If you think having your game available for free at launch isn’t worse for sales than only having it be available to buy you’re either ignorant or disingenuous”
Some games available “for free” outpeform games not available for free on sales, how do you explain this “common sense”?
Yep, you would as you seem to be lacking it.
If some games do it it just means those games were more interesting for the audience. It’s silly to compare diferent games in this way. Stop being silly
Then maybe it is better to make games interesting to an audience willing to buy. The problem with DRM is that with an platform as open as the PC is it is impossible to put the genie back in the bottle, if a game is not crackeable , there are thousands of free alternatives, legal or not. I did a research on sales in the Resident Evil franchise and there is no evidence that Denuvo increase or decrease sales, their best selling game is Resident Evil 2 remake and that game was cracked day 1 or 2 if i remember.
I haven’t noticed pop in textures.
“. As we’ve already reported, the game also does not feature any Ray Tracing effects at launch. Not only that, but there is no FOV slider (though the developers have confirmed that they will add one via a post-launch update).”
Also no one can craft the rail gun because there isnt enough resources in the game, some people fell off the map, or gest stuck on things, sound bugs, some text logs are iin russian. The upgrade that you get more resources if you destroy frozen enemies doesnt work and the collision model of some robots is larger than their body so they cant go through doors. Game is not finished. Yet they released with denuvo, they had time to put denuvo on it but not finish it. LMAO. Speaking of which, denuvo vs dev build performance comparison when?
One of the devepoers released a dev version of the game without denovo though apparently the game is impossibly hard on it because of intentional sabotage. The graphics look incredible though so I would like to play it once they release it with ray tracing and actually finish the game.
Not so much there isn’t enough resources as it is there’s a bug that prevents you from getting one particular resource you need to craft it that is dropped by pretty much any boss or “elite” enemy (the item does indeed “drop” but can’t be picked up or interacted with). But it almost doesn’t matter since there’s a separate bug that prevents items from being dropped from frozen enemies shattered regardless of whether you get the upgrade that increases item drops or not, or vaporized by the railgun.
“finished game”
So this game doesn’t stutter on Unreal 4 despite there being gigantic open areas with crazy sh@% like armies marching by? I guess Western Triple A game developers are just the most incompetent people ever. Let’s take a look at their employee “diversity”. Where are the purple and pink haired man hating activists that want to work from home and who throw temper tantrums like Sam Maggs screaming about lombax tiddies? Where are the dudes who force you to call them ma’am and who want to make all the female characters as hideous as them? https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/ed4d2da170be9419d505a5272b3b74ce3084fe1c8075374758d4bc10da7eee7d.png
you forgot the them/they culture lmao
I mean fair point right there: their idea of ‘diversity’ is hiring the same pastel haird men hating feminists over and over and over.
Ukrainian regime already calling for the game to be cancelled. Zelensky and his neo n@zi army can get bent. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/5eb5c58839808176088edb6ea8c85f344b637af1bf6cf27dd1cecdb3d2d91faf.jpg
I have heard russian devs don’t get money from Steam sales due to sanctions, is that true? It’s funny how they criticize the “romanticism of commie ideology”, since the people more likely to censor nowadays are western communists.
that a$$-l!ck3r can go to hell!
With this game there is no excuse to pirate it. It does not stutter, it can be played legaly for only $10 with game pass and it does not have microtransactions.
We gamers should not only boycot games that are “sub-par” but we should also spend on games that are “fair”, in order to push the industry to better practices.
You say no excuse to pirate iti have seen some videos on the leaked Dev Build and that has Ray tracig optios the full release does not.
Who cares about gaytracing?
Ta les kala men alla leipoun merika pragmata den.
There’s always an excuse.
Very well presented. Every quote was awesome and thanks for sharing the content. Keep sharing and keep motivating others.
Hey John, I updated my drivers today. And after restarting all my games, I noticed Atomic heart did not recompile shaders for the newest driver…
Any way to force an UE 4 game to recompile? What did you do when switching GPUs?
Look for and delete Shader Cache folder inside your game’s Engine/Local folder (sometimes it’s a single file called ‘GlobalSahderCache_bunchofnumbers’). Sometimes they’re located in My Documents.
If you can’t find it or it didn’t work, you can always delete Nvidia’s Shader Cache located at C:UsersAppdataLocalNVIDIADXCache
DDU and selecting delete shader cache option works as well. DDU is nice to use when you switch video cards. Cleans all the old stuff out and it’s like a fresh windows install for the GPU.
Great information shared.. really enjoyed reading this post thank you author for sharing this post .. appreciated
russian n@zi game
Give me the @zov game, i want to play something based on the recent war.
You’re mistaken, it’s Ukraine that has a Neo N@zi army (Azov Battalion), and has holidays and statues to celebrate N@zi collaborator Stephan Bandera.
stupid russian propaganda.
It’s always good to debunk propaganda, or else you just ends up like a dog barking meaningless insults.
Wagner is full of criminals and Nazis, they dont even hide it anymore. Its true that Azov had some “nationaliss-nazis” in it (not all of them were). Also, one question…… why did Putin released them free (Azov soldiers) if he claims and is 100% sure that they are all Nazis? He/they (Russians) exchanged them, have you an answer for this?
To be honest, i don’t really care about who is and isn’t a n-word.
“Wagner is full of criminals and N-words, they dont even hide it anymore.”
Recruiting prisoners to fight a war is not out of ordinary. Do you know about Tornado Battalion?
“why did Putin released them free (Azov soldiers)”
Prisoner exchange is a common occurrence in the war. Face it, n-word accusation is just meaningless propaganda to drum up support among the stupid, if your nation is under attack, would you care if n-words take up arms to defend them? Would you slander your own side? off course not.
Prisioners of war (most of them are for exchange) are held for months, years……. not like someone would do some big harm to them. Ofcourse you would exchange them some day….. but giving say 50 – 100 Ukrainian soldiers (half of them from Azov aka PURE EVIL NAZIS, not normal “brainwashed” western dude or Ukrainians how they see it) for just 10-20 Russians (I think it was less than 10 Russians) but ofc research for the correct numbers, not like I want to purposely claim false propaganda numbers or whatever.
Standard ruZZian lies.
Ukraine is quite similar to Israel in how it propagandizes itself: whitewashed as gay and liberal in the west, but in reality far right and extremely nationalistic, but that far right nationalism is not for export it seems.
First, we all need to do some proper and full research….. not half assed and reallize the full truth about Ukraine.
1. Its true that Ukraine has and had some “extremists” (right oriented mostly, also left), you know…. Hitler was also right, not left. The right side hates mostly “foreigns”.
2. Its true that Ukraine is relatively corrupt.
3. Its true that Ukraine paid big price during WW2 and prior to it or history in general, they played big part during the WW2, they played a big role during the war and they were sent several times to the front against N@zis, against much more powerful Germans but they “mysteriously” beated those N@zis….
Ukrainians were starved to death multiple times by Russians, Staljin, Lenjin etc. also sent to some “war” missions several times when they were obiviously weaker without much support and its a history FACT. Althouth they surprisingly ended up as “winners” sometimes…..
So, its not all black and white. The Soviet Union alone never beated N@zi Germany…… just look up how much airforce and weapons the west sent to them and was used against N@zis. Obiviously Ukrainians and Russians (who were living in Ukraine) had the most trouble with Germans….
Although the Red Army WAS ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF HISTORY, YES…… its also true that about 20 – 30 thousands German womans were raped, all the thefts (the first official screenshots after Berlin were banned by Russians, later they released the “photoshoped” version to hide all the theft they did (not loot).
So, all in all, is it right to call the Ukrainians N@zi? Ofcourse not…..
BTW also, dont forgret that at some time, the Soviet Union were allies with Hitler.
You want the full truth…. HERE, YOU ALL HAVE IT!
The American corpo-media sees Ukraine as woke (for whatever reason), but Ukraine is as far from woke as Pluto is from Earth.
Nationalistic? Yes, provoked by Putin’s aggression.
Far right? Not really. The Servant of the People party, by far the largest in the Verkhova Rada, is libertarian and the center-right have a large minority, but the far-right isn’t nearly as popular as ruZZian propaganda makes it out to be. The only far right party, Svoboda, only ever managed to gain ONE seat in the Verkhova Rada, out of 450.
Useless labels, the war gave the excuse needed to go full jingoistic and to the gov to enact extreme measures like banning political parties and opposition media. One american skinhead who fought there said that if anyone was wondered where are all the skinhead, they are fighting for Ukraine, so it is kind of like an international ideology akin to how Isis was in the muslim world. I don’t blame Ukraine for relying on fascists or even war criminals to fight the war, it’s not a time for pettiness.
Some will wonder if Ukraine will go liberal at the end of the war. Not a simple answer, if it ends in a stalemate, they will need to continue being nationalistic against russia, just like US let Israel and Saudi Arabia to be as they are instead of bullying them around like they do Europe.
Should we forget that the Soviet Union and Russians were at some point at the same side like Hitler and Nazis? Should we also forget that Nazis DIDNT like “woke-ers”, Jews etc. Should we also forget that now (today) Russia is at least officially on the same side as Jews? Should we also forget that Wagner is actually an N@zi group, also full of criminials from prison (they dont even hide id), they even said they had their fingers on USA elections etc. Its all on the wild, officialy FROM THEIR OWN MOUTH:
No, the setting is based on an alternate communist timeline, similar to Prey 2017, which it was on an alternate timeline where president Kennedy didn’t have his brain blow out.
Does anyone else have vsync grayed out? Huge screen tearing for me. I can force it via Nvidia. It is from gamepass and.not steam if that matters
This is how you develop a game in unreal engine. They made a perfect pc game.
Which UE game is this, 4 or 5?
Great optimization work by the team! ?
You should have actually play this game for few hours to get to the village. From that point we’ve got open world and my frames went from locked 116 to 60 on 3070ti in 1800p 🙂 you chose very bad place for benchmark , just like most reviewers