Crimson Desert PS5 Pro Performance Praised, but CPU Issues Linger

Pearl Abyss's open-world action RPG Crimson Desert finally showed its console hand last week, and the verdict from Digital Foundry's March 12 technical deep-dive is cautiously encouraging with a few asterisks attached.

The footage was a long time coming. As Kotaku's Zack Zwiezen noted, "Oddly, up until this point, we hadn't seen Crimson Desert running on a console, something that had made fans nervous." That anxiety sharpened further when it emerged that reviews wouldn't go live until 24 hours before the March 19 launch, and that reviewers would only receive access to the PC port rather than console builds.

Digital Foundry's lengthy video and article addressed the PS5 Pro build specifically, and Zwiezen summarized the findings plainly: "It's mostly good news." The PS5 Pro version supports three visual modes, optimal, balanced, and quality, with optimal functioning as the performance-focused option. Across all three, the image holds up well. "The game looks sharp in all three visual modes," according to Digital Foundry's analysis, and the broader package left a strong impression: "The game looks massive, boasts an impressive host of gameplay features, and sports impressive visuals. It could end up being one of 2026's biggest games."

The clearest technical wrinkle is PSSR upscaling. Some artifacts in the footage were significant enough that they could "ruin parts of the image," a phrase pulled directly from Digital Foundry's coverage. That said, there is reason for optimism on that front. Digital Foundry noted that Crimson Desert uses an upgraded version of the PSSR implementation seen in Resident Evil Requiem, and expressed hope that the final retail build will show improvement over what was demonstrated in the pre-launch footage.

A separate concern flagged in early coverage centers on CPU performance. Digital Foundry's March 12 analysis raised issues in that area, though full specifics from the technical breakdown, including any frametime data or utilization figures, warrant a closer read of their complete video and article for the precise findings.

One important caveat runs through all of this: every console frame analyzed so far comes exclusively from the PS5 Pro build. Standard PS5 performance, or how the game handles on Xbox hardware, remains publicly unaddressed ahead of launch. With Crimson Desert hitting storefronts on March 19, answers on those fronts are arriving very shortly.