Last month, NEXON released its third-person looter shooter, The First Descendant, on PC. 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 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 556.12, and the Radeon Adrenalin Edition 24.6.1 drivers. Moreover, we’ve disabled the second CCD on our 7950X3D.
NEXON has added a few graphics settings to tweak. PC gamers can adjust the quality of Visibility, Shadows, Textures, Reflections, Vegetation and more. The game also supports Ray Tracing, as well as NVIDIA DLSS 3 and AMD FSR 3.0. We have separate articles for them, so be sure to check them out.
The First Descendant does not have a built-in benchmark tool. Therefore, for both our CPU and GPU benchmarks, we used its hub area. This area appeared to be taxing both the CPU and the GPU. As such, it can give us a pretty good idea of how the rest of the game performs. We also lowered our resolution to 720p for our CPU tests (so that we could avoid any possible GPU bottleneck).
To see how the game runs with different types of CPUs, we simulated dual-core, quad-core, and hexa-core CPUs. And from what we saw, The First Descendant is the first game that can take advantage of eight CPU threads. At 720p/Epic Settings, our eight-core CPU was 14-17% faster than our simulated hexa-core CPU.
It’s also interesting to witness the behavior of SMT on these various CPU configurations. SMT/Hyper-Threading can improve performance on CPU with 2 or 4 cores. However, it will slightly lower performance on CPUs with 6 or 8 cores.
At 1080p/Epic Settings, you’ll need an equivalent to the NVIDIA RTX 3080 to get a constant 60fps experience. On Epic Settings, the game uses Lumen, something that explains these performance numbers.
At 1440p/Epic Settings, only the AMD Radeon RX 7900XTX and the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 were able to provide a smooth gaming experience. The AMD Radeon RX 6900XT was able to push an average of 70fps, but it could drop to 40fps at times. As for Native 4K/Epic Settings, there is no GPU that can offer 60fps at all times.
Graphics-wise, The First Descendant looks great. Since it uses Nanite, the pop-in is kept at a minimum. Lumen is also doing a good job of making the environments look great. The devs have also used a lot of high-resolution textures, and the main characters look really detailed. There is really nothing to complain about here.
Sadly, though, it suffers from noticeable stuttering issues. These are most likely traversal stutters (as the game has a shader compilation process before loading its map). So, that’s a bummer.
All in all, The First Descendant performs similarly to other UE5 games. For native resolutions, you’ll need a high-end GPU, especially for gaming at 1440p or 4K. However, since DLSS and FSR look great here, we suggest using them. The First Descendant is also one of the few PC games that can use up to eight CPU threads. This was a pleasant surprise as UE5 has been known for its awful CPU multithreading capabilities.
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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53% user review score. People are angry that it has aggressive microtransactions and runs like a stuttering mess.
HELLO, how did you not see this coming? The fact it's a Korean F2P, and uses UE5….were not enough clues it would be a microtransaction infested stuttering mess?
It's like people acting surprised when they have a virus after downloading cracked games from Russian sites.
"hoW DiD tHiS HaPPen!?!". Complete morons, these people should not be allowed online for their own safety.
I just play the game without the micro transactions. Nobody is forcing anyone to buy anything. You buy something, then that's on you.
So, turning off RT does not turn of Lumen/Nanite? I don't want to turn off everything, I just want the 2 settings which control Lumen/Nanite.
From what I've seen, you can't turn them off completely (unless Low Global Illumination disables Lumen as it brings a noticeable performance boost). The settings with the biggest performance impact are Shadows and Objects. So tweak those.
It seems unreal engine (4, and also 5) has stuttering as a very core issue. Shader compilation stuttering was prevalent in the UE4 era. Thankfully nowadays most games include a shader compilation step. However, this step doesn't always get all shaders and you still have leftovers.
What seems completely unsolved and ubiquitous to all UE5 games is that traversal stuttering. Clearly the game has issues dumping a bunch of stuff on the CPU at invisible lines. Epic doesn't seem to want to fix this, and it also must be hard. It's worth mentioning the same issue does NOT (at least not always) happen on consoles.
Epic needs to realize giving complex tools to developers might not always be enough and devise a more comprehensive approach to these issues, cause we're gonna have a million UE5 games coming.
>epic needs to realize
They don't care. They are the first ones to know there are loading stutter issues on pc as it persists even in fortnite, their own inhouse game. It's by design. Other game engines don't have it atleast as bad as unreal. So it's epic not giving a sh*t about better pcgaming performance as they've always been sort of anti pcgaming.
that's fine
A third-person looter shooter from NEXON. What a f*kn dump!
Are yes, more forced TAA nonsense. Even if it wasn't for the other issues, I wouldn't play something like that.
I have not tried this yet but I plan to at some point. Also I did not even know you could make a male character in this game. I only ever saw people make female characters for the outfits.
I've been able to manage 65-75 FPS on average with my 5700XT via Steam+Proton using the Mesa 24.0 driver with MangoHUD to get the FPS readouts. It's actually very smooth on Vulkan with the VKD3D translation layer and looks great too even at medium with OOTB settings with the only exemption being 1440p and unlimited FPS. My only issue is my monitor is capped at 75 Hz, but even then it doesn't dip below 75 unless it's dueing a screen transition segment. During gameplay, it's constantly at max FPS I can get.
The game isn't that taxing on hardware for the visuals it has, even with hardware a few generations old.
I'm sure higher settings will tax the GPU more, but honestly, the game looks great even at lower stuff, so I honestly could care less about bumping it up.
Good to see another Linux user has found his way here!
And good to hear that you are getting a pleasant gaming experience with it.
BTW, which distro are you using?
John make up your mind, does the game uses 8 threads or 8 cores?
indeed another MP masqurading as SP…