A few days ago, Bloober Team released a PC demo for its upcoming Unreal Engine 5-powered horror game, Layers of Fear. Thus, we’ve decided to test and share our initial PC performance impressions of it.

For these first benchmarks, we used an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 32GB of DDR5 at 6000Mhz, and NVIDIA’s RTX 4090. We also used Windows 10 64-bit, and the GeForce 531.79 WHQL driver.

Layers of Fear will be one of the first games that will be using Unreal Engine 5. According to the developers, the game uses Lumen, Ray Tracing, Volumetric Lighting and Niagara. However, there is no support for Nanite.

During the entire demo, our NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 was able to push framerates higher than 70fps at all times. That was at native 4K on Max Settings with Ray Tracing. Most of the time, our framerates were averaging between 80-100fps.

From what we could see, Bloober Team has only used Ray Tracing for reflections. For the game’s lighting and global illumination, the developers took advantage of UE5’s Lumen tech.

What’s also interesting here is that Layers of Fear has very minor traversal stutters, and no signs of any shader compilation stutters. As such, the game runs smoothly on the PC.

To be honest, I’m pleasantly surprised by Layers of Fear. I mean, this is Bloober Team we’re talking about so I wasn’t expecting much. The Medium had major performance issues, and so did Blair Witch. Layers of Fear, however, looks and runs great.

The only downside here is the game’s raised black levels. Most of you will get used to them after a while, however, we believe that the game would benefit from proper black levels. Bloober Team and Anshar Studios are looking into it so hopefully they’ll fix it before the game’s launch.

Layers of Fear will release on June 15. Below you can also find some 4K PC screenshots from it.

Enjoy!