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.”
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