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Pragmata PC performance tested: 18 GPUs take us to the Moon

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Why This Matters

Pragmata's advanced graphics features and exclusive path tracing for GeForce cards highlight the ongoing hardware competition and the push for cutting-edge visual fidelity in gaming. This game exemplifies how new titles are leveraging the latest technology to deliver immersive experiences, influencing both consumer choices and industry standards.

Key Takeaways

It’s been a banner year for Capcom fans. On the heels of Resident Evil Requiem, we now get Pragmata, a totally new sci-fi shooter that offers not only an intriguing premise but also a boatload of the latest technical features to tantalize PC gamers. We've tested Pragmata across 18 GPUs over the past few days to find the best ways to play.

Pragmata tells the story of Hugh, the only surviving member of an ill-fated lunar rescue team, and Diana, an adorable android with handy hacking skills, as they work together to navigate a giant 3D-printed lunar facility called the Cradle. They face off against an AI overseer and a menagerie of additively manufactured robots that are all working to stop their attempts to escape.

This title’s core combat blends strategic gunplay (courtesy of Hugh) and puzzle solving under pressure (courtesy of Diana) to blast bots back into the Lunafilament from which they’re made. That blend of mechanics immediately feels fresh and rewarding, and in tandem with its intriguing lunar setting, it’s one of the few games of late that’s really grabbed me and made me want to play through to the end.

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Beyond its catchy premise, Pragmata is a technical tour de force, and that’s been my focus as I’ve tested over a dozen graphics cards with it over the past few days. Like Resident Evil Requiem, it uses the latest RE Engine to deliver path tracing for realistic lighting effects on cutting-edge hardware.

Pragmata is being heavily promoted by Nvidia, so it’s no surprise that it offers almost every cutting-edge DLSS feature. DLSS upscaling, Ray Reconstruction, and Frame Generation are all present as you would expect. Possibly due to that heavy promotional tie-in, this game’s much-touted path tracing mode is exclusive to GeForce cards. That feature exclusivity isn’t anything new for Capcom in 2026, as Resident Evil Requiem also locked its path-tracing to GeForces.

In any case, that Radeon lockout is disappointing, and it seems motivated more by business reasons than by any technical limitation. As you’ll see, Radeon RX 9000-series cards perform exceptionally well in this title, and AMD has a similar (if not 100% comparable) suite of FSR tech to compete with Nvidia’s software stack that Capcom could have drawn on if it wanted to here. But in a world where Nvidia holds the vast majority of the gaming GPU market on top of its oceans of AI cash flow, money talks, we suppose.

On AMD, you get FSR 3 upscaling as a baseline and FSR 4 support with Radeon RX 9000-series cards, as well as welcome support for FSR ML Frame Generation. Older RX 7000- and RX 6000-series cards only get FSR 3 upscaling and framegen, and we can confirm that FSR 4 is a noticeable step up, especially for framegen. Intel Arc gamers don’t get any XeSS features, so they’ll have to rely on FSR 3 for a performance boost, as well.

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