Tainted Grail: The Fall will leave Early Access and will be fully released later today. And, since Awaken Realms has provided us with a review code, we’ve decided to take a look at its final version. Powered by the Unity Engine, 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 576.40, and the Radeon Adrenalin Edition 25.5.1 drivers.
Tainted Grail: The Fall comes with a respectable number of graphics settings. PC gamers can adjust the quality of Textures, Shadows, Vegetation and more. The game also supports NVIDIA DLSS and Unity Engine’s STP, however, there is no support for AMD FSR or Intel XeSS.
The game does not feature any built-in benchmark. So, for our tests, we used the following open-world location. This appeared to be one of the most demanding areas we could find early in the game. As such, it should give us a pretty good idea of how the rest of it runs.
At 1080p/Max Settings, almost all of our GPUs were able to provide a smooth gaming experience. With a G-Sync monitor, even our NVIDIA RTX 2080Ti was able to provide a smooth experience.
Contrary to some other recent games, Tainted Grail: The Fall seems to run great on AMD’s hardware. The AMD Radeon RX 6900XT is faster than the NVIDIA RTX 3080. The newly released AMD Radeon RX 9070XT was also able to come close to the performance of the AMD Radeon RX 7900XTX.
On the other hand, the NVIDIA RTX 5080 performed exactly the way we anticipated. This GPU was slower than the NVIDIA RTX 4090, but faster than both the AMD Radeon RX 7900XTX and the AMD Radeon RX 9070XT.
At 1440p/Max Settings, the NVIDIA RTX 3080 was unable to provide a smooth gaming experience. For gaming with 60FPS at that resolution natively, you’ll need at least an AMD Radeon RX 6900XT. Moreover, at both 1440p and 4K, the AMD Radeon RX 9070XT was slower than the AMD Radeon RX 7900XTX.
As for Native 4K/Max settings, you’ll need an NVIDIA RTX 4090 or an NVIDIA RTX 5090 for a constant 60FPS experience. If you own a G-Sync monitor, you’ll also get a smooth gaming experience with the NVIDIA RTX 5080.
Graphics-wise, Tainted Grail: The Fall is a mixed bag. Sometimes, it can look great. However, there is a visual inconsistency here. The game does not use Ray Tracing for its Global Illumination and as a result of that, it can look kind of ugly at times. There are also a lot of pop-in issues.
As I said, the game uses Unity Engine. And, as we can see, Unity Engine is nowhere close to Unreal Engine 5. The reason I’m saying this is because other small teams have been able to create some incredibly-looking games in UE5. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Still Wakes the Deep and Nobody Wants to Die are three great examples.
Before closing, I should note that the game suffers from MAJOR shader compilation stutters. The good news is that the devs are aware of them and have promised to fix them in a post-launch update.
All in all, Tainted Grail: The Fall can run great on a wide range of GPUs at 1080p. Things get a bit more demanding at 1440p, and especially at 4K. And although NVIDIA users can use DLSS, AMD and Intel users are left behind as there is no support for FSR or XeSS. I know, I know. You can still use STP. However, it’s inexcusable for a game to only support DLSS and not the other two upscaling techniques. The game’s graphics also do not justify these GPU requirements, meaning that there is room for additional performance optimizations.
We should also keep in mind that this is a Skyrim-like game from a small team. And, to its credit, as a game, Tainted Grail: The Fall feels like it can rival Bethesda’s RPGs. It sounds crazy, but the devs have created something really cool here. Nevertheless, there is room for some additional optimization here. So, let’s hope that they will keep working on it via some post-launch updates!
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.”
Contact: Email
i am hearing this game isnt just a skyrim clone but actually has choices and good writing and its better than all new bethesda, bioware, obsidian games.
Every time nerds say something has good writing then it's bad news for all people who want to play a video game.
if i hear another reddit tier dialogue in a game with goofy gay cringe characters that dont take anything seriously and everything is a joke to them, i will go postal , i will find the redditor who wrote it and i will talk to him…i just want to talk to him…and shove him in a locker.
Seriously if you the person who created the world cant take it seriously, why should i?
only homosexuals care about story, it’s not an issue as long as they let you skip dialogues and story parts
Braindead moröns would never pay attention to the story anyway, so all you need to do is to plug-in your SNES and go crazy on SMW!
A braindead moron would definitely be a f4g too and since f4ggots have low testosterone and a high amount of estrogen, they definitely love story and gossip just like women and school girls.
Long story short, you're gay and that's why you play video games for story. Are you rytarded enough to watch movies for gameplay too or…?
Why you waste your life away typing this kind of nonsense? Rethink your life choices.
You like story in video games and my comment made you upset, but notice how you can't prove me wrong.
I’m not upset , I pity you.
But I just insulted people who like story games and you do like story games.
How can you pity someone you can’t see or don’t know? I think saying you pity me is just your defense/cope mechanism and reaction to being insulted (by me).
You’re a troubled person, I can’t be insulted by a person who needs help.
I’m a troubled person because I don’t like your favorite games? Are you sure you’re not upset?
it`s obvious you`re trubled person just by reading the things you write, games have nothing to do with it.
You can’t even write properly, I feel bad for you.
I don’t want to sound racist but at first I thought you might be a recently transitioned person because of your irrational behavior and lack of reasoning but I think you’re just gay.
Having said that, Are you a brown person?
lmao totally not upset
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/cd2e2c0f8e043cc42ecc74e0d03fa995fa6b56a6802cf76b0d843815a3a47233.png
Yes, also, the combat looks nothing like the elder series. It's meaty, and the magic system seems quite interesting. There are a bunch of things to do, and the world looks actually nice. Seems like a good time waster. A return to roots morrowind-like RPG.
i wouldnt compare it to morrowind, that game is much more complex than this, but yeah its better than any other rpg Bethesda has made apart from morrowind.
Well, yeah, you are right. Morrowind it's just something special. Probably the only special thing Bethesda did.
5080 is almost 50% faster than 7900 XTX / 9070 XT, John says 'AMD GPUs perform excellently and 5080 performs as expected"
Bro, what?
At 4K, the 5080 is 19% faster than the 7900XTX. At 1440p, it's 31% faster. So, I don't know what you're talking about. Usually, the 5080 is around 20-30% faster than the 7900XTX.
There are games in which the gap is smaller, but what I mentioned above is the usual percentage difference between them.
Where are you pulling 5080 being 30% faster than 7900 XTX in pure raster?
5080 is barely 12% faster than 4080S in raster (or RT really) and 7900 XTX matches or exceeds 4080S in raster.
We can confirm DSO Gaming has been bought by NVidia, considering John posts so far, https://youtu.be/AiekGcwaIho
Don`t be silly.
Reagan's war on education still effects us to this day
Don't know where he getting his values from either, the difference between the cards is around 10% tops, nowhere near 50%.
This keeping in mind AMD still has a long year of optimisation to do on the RX 9700 XT, so the gap will only close same as previous generations.
120fps in 1440p on 5090 on a ugly looking game like this, wow. Unity is crap or the devs are.
Hey, one note about upscaling. We had good reason to scrap FSR and XeSS; STP is simply superior to them.
XeSS was the heaviest with the most artifacts. 90% XeSS looked worse than 40% STP, and 40% XeSS had fewer FPS than STP. FSR offered similar performance to STP, but FSR produced more ghosting and blurrier frames.
So, we could have spent time maintaining XeSS and FSR in the project just so players could choose a worse option. That didn't make sense, so we scrapped them. We ended up with DLSS, which is the best option but not available for everyone, and STP for others, as it was the second best.
Maybe FSR4 will change the landscape, and perhaps it will be added in a future patch.
I love your game.
https://media3.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPTg5OGZmOWM5emhpa2lpeThhZ21pZ2FmdG42azVvOG52enBkdTBwZDZhdTdodGFrbCZlcD12MV9naWZzX3NlYXJjaCZjdD1n/KQOPqeBRpimcw/giphy-downsized-small.mp4
Interesting game, it feels a bit like gothic 3 and skyrim had a baby and I enjoyed both games a lot ;P I`m quite immersed so far, good job.
I am loving this game so far, it s really good and rewarding