GoKawiilCrimson Desert is the type of game that shouldn’t ever see the light of day. Built originally as a prequel for popular MMO Black Desert Online before being scrapped and redirected to a single-player release, and sitting in development for close to a decade, Crimson Desert could have easily died in development. Add on top of that a proprietary game engine called BlackSpace, a modest headcount, and no external publisher — Crimson Desert defies the narrative about how AAA games are built and released today. But we’re here. Crimson Desert is real, it’s massive, and I’ve been poking around Pywel with the best CPUs for gaming to see how they react.
The results are positive. I mainly tested on the last few generations of AMD and Intel chips, though I threw in a Ryzen 7 2700X (just above the game’s minimum-spec CPU) and a Core i3-13100F (a weak quad-core chip) into the mix to see how they'd hold up. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get to as many older AM4 chips, due to time and some bent pins. It’s been a while.
Otherwise, Crimson Desert sets up a platonic ideal of how CPUs should scale in a modern game. Everything falls in line the way you’d expect, which is surprisingly rare to find in recent games, especially close to launch. You won’t find a performance wall like what we saw in Resident Evil Requiem , nor get the ever-present oddity of AMD’s eight-core offering outperforming its 12-core one.
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That doesn’t mean everyone is going to have a great experience. Although Crimson Desert ran well enough with a quad-core chip, it can certainly leverage a higher core count. And older architectures like Zen+ struggle, though that shouldn’t come as a surprise.
I ran through 20 CPUs, but I also played the game myself to uncover any strangeness in this unique engine — and there is some. Overall, however, Crimson Desert is an enigma. It shouldn’t work as well as it does given its dense systems and overwhelming landscape, but developer Pearl Abyss was able to stick the landing.
CPU Scaling in Crimson Desert
For testing, I used the RTX 5090 FE to isolate CPU performance as much as possible. Naturally, the numbers change when looking at a weaker GPU, but we’re looking at the overall trend in performance across chips here more so than the numbers themselves. I tested at native 1080p without upscaling or frame generation — Crimson Desert supports both in DLSS and FSR flavors — and with the Ultra preset and ray tracing disabled. There’s a further Cinematic preset that pushes the engine’s capabilities to the max, though for only a small visual payoff. Even on my personal PC with an RTX 5080 and Ryzen 9 9900X, I stuck with the Ultra preset.
(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)
There’s a smooth gradient of performance from the top of the stack to the bottom, but somewhere in the range of a Core i5-14600K or Ryzen 7 9700X is the sweet spot. Past that point, we see much smaller jumps in performance. The Ryzen 9 9900X is only 2% faster than the Ryzen 7 9700X, and while the Ryzen 9 9950X is a solid 8% faster, it’s also twice as expensive.
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