Last week, Kepler Interactive released Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Powered by Unreal Engine 5, it’s time now to benchmark it and examine its performance on the PC.
For our benchmarks, we used an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 32GB of DDR5 at 6000Mhz, AMD’s Radeon RX 6900XT, RX 7900XTX, RX 9070XT, as well as NVIDIA’s RTX 2080Ti, RTX 3080, RTX 4090, RTX 5080, and RTX 5090. We also used Windows 10 64-bit, the GeForce 576.15, and the Radeon Adrenalin Edition 25.4.1 drivers.
Sandall Interactive has added a few graphics settings to tweak. PC gamers can adjust the quality of Textures, Shadows, Global Illumination and more. There are also options for Motion Blur, Film Grain, Chromatic Aberration and Vignette. Plus, the game supports NVIDIA DLSS and Intel XeSS. However, there is no support for AMD FSR. There is also no support for Frame Gen (though you can enable DLSS 4 Frame Gen with this mod).
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 does not have a built-in benchmark tool. So, for our benchmarks, we used the starting area from the Prologue. This area appeared to be one of the most demanding ones you’ll encounter early in the game. As such, it should give us a pretty good idea of how the rest of the game runs.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is mostly a GPU-bound title. At 1080p/Epic, you’ll need at least an AMD Radeon RX9070 XT. The NVIDIA RTX 3080 was nowhere close to offering a smooth gaming experience. Similarly, while the AMD Radeon RX 6900XT could deliver an average framerate of 62FPS, it would also drop to 53FPS.
At 1440p/Epic Settings, the only GPUs that could run the game with over 60FPS were the NVIDIA RTX 4090 and the RTX 5090. As for Native 4K/Epic Settings, the NVIDIA RTX 5090 was able to provide framerates over 60FPS at all times.
Like all the latest UE5 games, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 can scale well on older/weaker GPUs with its in-game graphics presets. At Native 4K/High Settings, the game ran with 80-92FPS on the NVIDIA RTX 5090. By dropping the settings to Medium, we were able to get over 99FPS at all times. And then, on Low Settings, we were getting framerates between 119-132FPS.
Graphics-wise, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 looks really weird with TSR 100% or with DLAA. As I’ve said in my previous articles, it feels like the game is being rendered at a lower resolution. The devs have also applied a sharpening filter that can make things even worse. Thankfully, you can remove the sharpening filter with this mod. This mod will also remove the 30FPS cap from the cut-scenes. By using DLSS Quality (or Intel XeSS Quality), you can get better results than those at native res. I know it sounds strange, but that’s what’s happening here.
With those “fixes”, the game can look great. All character models are highly detailed, and the environments look great. Lumen is also doing a great job here. The lighting looks great and consistent throughout the entire game. I did notice some pop-in issues here and there, though. So, I don’t know for which objects the devs have used Nanite. According to the executable file, the game uses UE5.4.4. So, it should support Nanite for pretty much everything. However, you will spot some pop-ups with various objects.
Before closing, I should note that I did not experience any major stuttering issues. During my 10-hour playthrough (so far), I’ve only encountered around five or ten? Those were random stutters, and not traversal or shader compilation stutters. So, rest assured that this isn’t a stutterfest.
All in all, I’m quite impressed by Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Yes, the game does have some issues (especially with the sharpening filter and the blurriness at native res). It should have also supported Frame Gen – and AMD FSR – from the get-go. However, this game is created by a really small team. And the fact that it looks so good speaks volumes about the capabilities of Unreal Engine 5.
I know a lot of people blame UE5 for the stutters we’ve seen in some games. That’s not an engine issue, though. It’s a dev issue. If a game stutters, it’s because the devs have coded it in such a way. We’ve seen other UE5 games that do not stutter on PC. So, instead of blaming the engine, you should start blaming the devs.
UE5 is a bless for a lot of small teams. By using it, small teams have managed to create games that can look amazing. Nobody Wants to Die, Still Wakes The Deep, RoboCop: Rogue City, Steel Seed and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 are such examples. Without UE5, these devs would not have been able to create these games. And that’s why more and more devs have switched to UE5.
Enjoy!
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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