Last week, Frogwares released a remastered version of The Sinking City for free to all of its owners. Powered by Unreal Engine 5 and using Lumen, 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.
Frogwares has retained the same settings for the remastered version of the game. The only additional settings are those for Upscaling and Ray Tracing. To be more precise, the game now supports NVIDIA DLSS 3 and AMD FSR 3.0. Now, while there is a Frame Gen setting for both DLSS and FSR, it does not work at all with DLSS. According to reports, the game is missing the DLSS Frame Gen DLL file right now. On the other hand, FSR Frame Gen works, but it’s locked to the AMD FSR Upscaling. In other words, you can’t use DLSS Super Resolution with AMD FSR Frame Gen. As for Ray Tracing, the devs have used it to enhance the game’s reflections.
The Sinking City Remastered does not have a built-in benchmark tool. So, for our tests, we used this area from the starting level. This area appeared to be quite taxing, so it should give us a pretty good idea of how the rest of the game runs.
The Sinking City Remastered is a GPU-bound title. At 1080p/Max Settings/No Ray Tracing, you’ll need at least an NVIDIA RTX 4080 or an AMD Radeon RX 9070XT to get framerates over 60FPS. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, the game is using Lumen (which is a form of Ray Tracing). So yes, you’ll need to use upscaling to improve performance.
It’s also worth noting that the AMD Radeon RX 6900XT is noticeably slower than the NVIDIA RTX 3080 at 1080p. On the other hand, the AMD Radeon RX 9070XT is able to match the performance of the RX 7900XTX.
The only GPUs that could run the game with over 60FPS at all times at 1440p/Max Settings/No RT were the NVIDIA RTX 4090 and the NVIDIA RTX 5090.
As for Native 4K/Max Settings/No RT, there is no GPU that can offer a smooth gaming experience. Even the NVIDIA RTX 5090 can drop below 55FPS. As we can see, the NVIDIA RTX 3080 fell to its knees (most likely due to its 10GB of VRAM). Moreover, the AMD Radeon RX 9070XT was noticeably slower at 4K than the RX 7900XTX.
Now, the good news here is that you can significantly improve performance via the in-game settings. By dropping to High, we were able to get over 83FPS at all times on the NVIDIA RTX 5090. That’s a 62% performance increase. On Medium Settings, we were able to get to 120FPS. And then, on Low Settings, we got an average framerate of 157FPS. So, while the Ultra Settings are demanding, the game can scale well on weaker GPUs by using the High or Medium Settings.
Graphics-wise, The Sinking City Remastered looks better than its original 2019 version. Frogwares has used higher-quality textures, and the lighting has been overhauled thanks to Lumen. I don’t really have any complaints about the game’s graphics. Sure thing, this isn’t a graphical showcase like Hellblade 2. However, Frogwares is a small team. So, for what it actually is, The Sinking City Remastered looks great. The only downside is that the game still suffers from traversal stutters. This was an issue in the 2019 version, too. So, no. UE5 is not to be blamed for these traversal stutters. It’s just how the game was developed. So, it’s a bummer the devs have not done anything to fix them.
All in all, The Sinking City Remastered is quite demanding on Ultra Settings. Those who want to use them will also have to enable NVIDIA DLSS or AMD FSR. As said, DLSS Frame Gen is not working right now, and FSR Frame Gen is locked to the AMD FSR Upscaling. Thankfully, you can significantly improve performance by dropping to High Settings. Those settings appear to offer the best visual/performance ratio. So, make sure to use them if you want to stick to Native Resolutions.
Enjoy and stay tuned for more!
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