Sherlock Holmes The Awakened releases later today on PC, and Frogwares has just lifted its review embargo. Powered by Unreal Engine 4, it’s time to benchmark it and see how it performs on the PC platform.

For this PC Performance Analysis, we used an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 32GB of DDR5 at 6000Mhz, 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 531.41 and the Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition 23.3.2 drivers.

Frogwares has added a few graphics settings to tweak. PC gamers can adjust the quality of View Distance, Anti-Aliasing, Textures, Effects, Foliage, Post-Process and Shadows. The game also supports NVIDIA’s DLSS 2 tech, and there is no support for AMD FSR 2 or Intel XeSS.

Sherlock Holmes The Awakened does not feature any built-in benchmark tool. Therefore, for both our CPU and GPU benchmarks, we used the game’s first open area.

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. We also disabled the second CCD on our AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D.

Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened will run smoothly on a wide range of CPUs. At 1080p/Epic Settings, even our simulated dual-core system was able to provide a constant 100fps experience. And that’s without using SMT (Hyper-Threading).

The game does not also require a high-end GPU. At 1080p/Epic Settings, even our “ancient” AMD Radeon RX580 was able to provide a constant 60fps experience.

At 1440p/Epic Settings, all of our top seven GPUs were able to provide a smooth gaming experience. As for native 4K/Epic Settings, our RTX2080Ti, RTX3080, RTX4090, RX 6900XT and RX 7900XTX had no trouble at all running it.

Graphics-wise, Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened looks dated. At times, even on Epic Settings, its environments can look flat. The main characters also look mediocre, at least by today’s standards. The game would greatly benefit from some Ray Tracing effects. Ideally, we’d like to see RTGI and RTAO. However, I believe Frogwares is not that interested in adding such effects to the game.

All in all, while Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened is not a great-looking game, it at least runs with 60fps on a huge range of PC configurations. Unfortunately, the game does suffer from some shader compilation stutters. Thankfully, though, these stutters are not as awful as those we saw in the launch version of The Callisto Protocol. And other than those shader stutters and the lack of Ray Tracing effects, we don’t really have anything negative to say about this new Sherlock Holmes game!