By Alex Battaglia
Publication Date: 2026-03-14 18:00:00
We’ve spent some time highlighting Crimson Desert’s top-line graphics features, exemplified by the PC version of the game – and we’ve also looked at how that experience scales to PlayStation 5 Pro. But what we haven’t shown you is what we think is the most potent visual upgrade available to PC players – and it perhaps comes from an unlikely source. The bottom line is this: while ray tracing looks impressive in this game, the visuals are transformed if users use either AMD ray regeneration or Nvidia’s ray reconstruction. It turns out that in this game, RT denoising is much, much more important than you might imagine.
Crimson Desert uses ray tracing intensively for its indirect lighting across most consoles and there’s a case to say that it drives the entire aesthetic of the game. However, to make this possible in a performant manner, the nature of the optimisations means that compromise is inevitable.
The game’s unique surfel-based ray-traced global illumination (RTGI) runs at a mere 1/16 rays per pixel, while RT reflections operate at quarter resolution, with both using a computationally lean denoiser. This dramatic reduction in ray count is how the game manages to perform as well as it does on a range of devices – but there is a distinct cost to visual quality as a consequence.
And this is where Nvidia and AMD denoisers make a big difference. The increase in lighting…
