The upcoming RPG Crimson Desert has caught plenty of attention for its open-world vistas, but they won't look the same across all hardware. Built on developer Pearl Abyss's proprietary BlackSpace engine, Crimson Desert stands a good chance of blowing players away with its technical presentation. To really have your socks knocked off, though, you're going to need a high-end PC.
A new Digital Foundry video on YouTube breaks down the difference between Crimson Desert's lighting options, and the approach the game takes on consoles is a world apart from high-end PC settings. Crimson Desert relies on ray-tracing for lighting across the board, but the standard implementation makes a lot of cuts to achieve a good optimization baseline. Comparing the standard settings side-by-side with ray reconstruction options on PC, the analysis certainly doesn't do any favors to the console version.
In recent years, ray-tracing has gone from relatively fringe lighting technology to the only system available in some modern games, but it carries a heavy performance tax at the best of times. To make things manageable, Crimson Desert cuts down dramatically on the actual number of rays being traced and employs a basic denoiser system...
