11 Bit Studios has lifted the review embargo for The Alters. The Alters is a sci-fi game with a unique blend of survival, adventure, and base-building elements. Powered by Unreal Engine 5, it’s time 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 576.66, and the Radeon Adrenalin Edition 25.5.2 drivers.

The Alters has a few graphics settings to tweak. PC gamers can adjust the quality of Textures, Shadows, Effects, Models and more. The game also supports NVIDIA DLSS 3.7, as well as AMD FSR 3 and Intel XeSS.

Although 11 Bit Studios released a separate benchmark tool for The Alters, that tool simply evaluates your PC hardware. It does not benchmark any scenes to provide you with performance results. So, in my opinion, that tool is a nothing-burger.

For our tests, we used the starting beach area. That area appeared to be more demanding than the one inside your spaceship. Thus, it should give us a pretty good idea of how the rest of the game runs.

I should also note a weird performance behavior. When launching the game, performance is kind of bad. By simply switching resolutions back and forth (or the upscaling method), you can gain back A LOT of performance. Here’s a comparison at Native 4K/Epic Settings. On the left, we have the game without the fix. On the right, we have it after enabling and then disabling DLSS. As you will see, there is no difference between them. Hell, I even used ICAT, and even with 400% zoom, I could not spot any differences.

Now, you might have thought that the game simply has DLSS enabled, even when you disable it. That’s not the case, though. With DLSS Quality, we were getting over 110FPS at all times. Without DLSS Q, we were getting 80FPS.

And again. If you simply drop your res to 1440p and then increase it to 4K (and not touch upscaling at all), you’ll get the same performance gains. As shown above, the image quality is exactly the same, despite the performance bump. So, I don’t know what is going on here, and what is causing this performance bug. Still, this is something you should be aware of.

The Alters is mostly a GPU-bound title. At 1080p/Ultra Settings, all of our GPUs were able to run it with over 60FPS at all times. These numbers appear a bit high for a UE5 game. Moreover, the AMD GPUs appear to run the game way better than the NVIDIA GPUs. Take for instance the AMD Radeon RX 7900XTX and the RX 9070XT. They were almost able to match the performance of the NVIDIA RTX 5080.

At 1440p/Ultra Settings, our top five GPUs were able to provide a smooth gaming experience. As for Native 4K/Ultra, the only GPU that was able to push framerates over 60FPS at all times was the NVIDIA RTX 5090.

Graphics-wise, The Alters looks amazing. 11 Bit Studios is a small team and thanks to UE5, it was able to create a really good-looking title. The environments looks great, and there are some cool weather effects. I’m not sure whether The Alters uses Lumen as I could not spot any visual artifacts. Still, the lighting does give the impression that Lumen is enabled. The game must be also using Nanite for its big structures and objects as I could not spot any pop-in issues with them. When it comes to shadows and smaller objects, there are a few pop-ups.

Before closing, I should note that the game will pre-compile its shaders once you launch it. Thus, you won’t get any shader compilation stutters. As you can also see from the video below, there aren’t any major traversal stutters. The frametime graph is solid, something that will please a lot of PC gamers.

All in all, The Alters appears to be a really polished game on PC. The game will run on a wide range of PC configurations, and it does not suffer from any major traversal stutters. It also looks great. This is a great example of a UE5 game running smoothly on PC.

Enjoy!