ESDigital Games will release its stealth-action adventure game, Steel Seed, on PC later today. Powered by Unreal Engine 5, it’s time now to benchmark it and examine its performance on 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 572.83, and the Radeon Adrenalin Edition 25.3.2 drivers.
The reason I used the 572.83 driver and not the 576.02 driver for the NVIDIA GPUs is because the shadows are corrupted with that driver on the RTX-50 series GPUs. Below you can find a screenshot that highlights this visual issue. Thankfully, the hotfix 576.15 driver, which came out today, fixes those issues. So, if you are planning to play it and you own an RTX-50 series GPU, I suggest using the latest hotfix driver or the 572.83 driver.
Storm in a Teacup has added a few graphics settings to tweak. PC gamers can adjust the quality of View Distance, Shadows, Lights and more. The game also supports NVIDIA DLSS 4, AMD FSR 3.0 and Intel XeSS. NVIDIA RTX 50 series owners can also use the NVIDIA App to enable Multi-Frame Gen.
Steel Seed does not have a built-in benchmark tool. So, for our tests, we benchmarked this area in the second level. From what I could see, this appeared to be one of the most demanding areas. As such, it should give us a pretty good idea of how the rest of the game runs.
Steel Seed is mostly a GPU-bound title. At 1080p/Ultra Settings, you will need at least an NVIDIA RTX 3080 for a smooth gaming experience. In this game, the AMD Radeon RX 6900XT falls behind the NVIDIA RTX 3080. Moreover, both the AMD Radeon RX 7900XTX and the 9070XT cannot come close to the NVIDIA RTX 5080. This shouldn’t come as a surprise as Steel Seed uses Lumen (which is a form of Ray Tracing). Still, I believe AMD will be able to improve the game’s performance on its GPUs with future drivers.
At 1440p/Ultra, the only GPUs that were able to provide framerates over 60FPS were the NVIDIA RTX 5080, RTX 4090 and RTX 5090. None of the AMD GPUs were able to offer a smooth gaming experience. As for Native 4K/Ultra, there is no GPU that can run the game with 60FPS.
Thankfully, Steel Seed can scale well on older/weaker GPUs thanks to its graphics settings. At Native 4K/High, we were able to get over 70FPS at all times on the NVIDIA RTX 5090. Medium Settings will also disable Lumen which can significantly improve performance. So, if you want to game at native resolutions, you can use the in-game settings to gain back performance.
Graphics-wise, Steel Seed looks great for a double-A game. Storm in a Teacup is a small team and thanks to UE5, the game punches above its weight. This is mainly due Lumen. Thanks to it, the game’s environments look amazing. This may also be the main reason why a lot of devs have adopted UE5. Obviously, Steel Seed cannot compete with something like Hellblade 2. However, a game with this kind of visuals from such a small team wouldn’t have been possible in the past.
I should also note that I did not experience any major traversal stutters. In the following video, you can see that the frametime graph is pretty solid. There are some minor stutters, but most of you won’t be able to notice them. The only stutters you may notice are those that occur just before a cut-scene starts.
Overall, Steel Seed is well optimized on PC. The game does not suffer from any major stutters, and it does not require a high-end CPU. And although it does have high GPU requirements, that’s due to Lumen. Again, Lumen is a form of RT, so you can’t expect even the RTX 5090 to run it smoothly at Native 4K. Thankfully, the game supports DLSS, FSR and XeSS. Not only that, but you can lower the in-game graphics to significantly improve its performance.
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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