Paradox Interactive has just released Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2. Powered by Unreal Engine 5, it’s time now to benchmark it and examine its performance on PC.
For our benchmarks, I 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. I also used Windows 10 64-bit, the GeForce 581.57, and the Radeon Adrenalin Edition 25.9.2 drivers.
The Chinese Room has added a few graphics settings to tweak. PC gamers can adjust the quality of Textures, Global Illumination, Shadows, and more. The game also supports NVIDIA DLSS 4 and AMD FSR 4.0. However, there is no support for Intel XeSS 2.0.
Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 does not have a built-in benchmark tool. So, for our benchmarks, I used the open-world area. This should give us a pretty good idea of how the rest of it runs.
In this article, we’ll be focusing on native resolution benchmarks. Those interested can find our DLSS 4 benchmarks here.
Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 does not require a high-end CPU. Even a modern-day quad-core CPU can push framerates over 60FPS. In fact, I was impressed by the performance of the dual-core. That CPU was able to provide a constant 30FPS experience. The game also does not appear to be able to take advantage of CPUs that have over 8-10 cores/threads.
Our top five GPUs were able to push framerates over 60FPS at all times at 1080p/Ultra Settings. The AMD Radeon RX 9070XT was able to match the performance of the AMD Radeon RX 7900XTX. Both of them were noticeably slower than the NVIDIA RTX 5080. On the other hand, the AMD Radeon RX 6900XT was able to beat the NVIDIA RTX 3080. With the AMD RX 6900XT, you can get a pretty good experience if you use a FreeSync monitor.
At 1440p/Ultra, the NVIDIA RTX 4090, RTX 5080, and RTX 5090 were able to push framerates over 60FPS. The AMD Radeon RX 7900XTX and the RX 9070XT were able to provide an enjoyable experience, provided you use a FreeSync monitor.
Finally, the only GPU that can run the game with 60FPS at Native 4K/Ultra is the NVIDIA RTX 5090. Bloodlines 2 uses Lumen, so this is a pleasant surprise. I was not expecting the NVIDIA RTX 5090 to offer a 60FPS experience at Native 4K.
By lowering the settings to High, we saw a 22–25% performance boost on the NVIDIA RTX 5090 at native 4K. Switching to Medium settings gave us another 10% increase, and Low settings added an extra 7–9% boost on top of that.
Graphics-wise, Bloodlines 2 looks really good. It’s not the best-looking PC game out there, but it still looks solid. Thanks to Lumen, the lighting stays consistent and realistic. However, there are quite a few visual artifacts caused by Software Lumen. It would have been nice to have an option for Hardware Lumen, but that would make the game run slower on most PCs. And then you’d have a lot of players complaining about poor performance issues. So, I get why the devs didn’t include higher-quality settings for Lumen.
My biggest issue with Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 PC Performance Analysis is its stuttering issues. Although it does not have any shader compilation stutters, it currently suffers from major traversal stutters. Things are really bad when you are exploring the open-world area. So, if you are sensitive to stutters, you should avoid this game. I don’t know whether the devs have any plans to address them. Realistically, I don’t expect any miracles. We’ve seen a lot of UE5 games that can stutter like crazy. So, this is one of those games.
Overall, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 can run at over 60FPS on many PCs, which is pretty good. However, the constant stutters really hurt the experience. These stutters are almost as bad as the ones in Oblivion Remastered, which is disappointing. On top of that, the visual issues from Software Lumen make things worse. The game could have used a bit more polish before release. Hopefully, the devs will fix these two problems, but I’m not expecting miracles – especially since most Unreal Engine 5 games still struggle with the same stuttering issues!
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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somehow the game is worse than we expected.
No, it is not.
How is it not worse?
I bet u haven't even played the game
Ikr?!
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FKyZSfdVIAIuYr-.jpg
This game is a dumpster fire. But everyone already expected that. When a game is made by a bunch of brain dead activist gamers, who hate everything from the past. They can't create anything good. Western culture is screwed artistically because of activism.
Ultra setting in any games has always been a meme, I will wait for comparative benchmarks at 1440p. As a 4090 and only getting 88fps just screen poorly optimised. But here we are with another Unreal Engine 5 based game that's performing poorly…shocker..
gonna be great to play out of humble bundle or gamepass next year
For some odd reason back when Oblivion remastered came out, my stutters were completely and utterly gone after I ran "altar.reflex.mode 3" command in the console.
There's an option in the config files to add Hardware Lumen, as in almost all UE5 games. It would be great if you could test it out for us, John!