Blades of Fire Benchmarks & PC Performance Analysis

505 Video games has lifted the assessment embargo for Blades of Fireplace. Powered by Mercury Engine 6, it’s time to benchmark it and look at its efficiency on PC.

For our benchmarks, we used an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 32GB of DDR5 at 6000Mhz, AMD’s Radeon RX 6900XT, RX 7900XTX, RX 9070XT, in addition to NVIDIA’s RTX 2080Ti, RTX 3080, RTX 4090, RTX 5080, and RTX 5090. We additionally used Home windows 10 64-bit, the GeForce 576.40, and the Radeon Adrenalin Version 25.5.1 drivers.

MercurySteam has added a couple of graphics settings to tweak. PC players can regulate the standard of Objects, Shadows, Textures, Volumetric and extra. Apparently sufficient, the sport forces an upscaling setting to everybody. Proper now, there isn’t any setting for TAA. As such, you might be compelled to make use of AMD FSR 3.0, NVIDIA DLSS 4 or Intel XeSS. Not solely that, however there may be an FPS goal setting that you simply can not disable. Oh, and you can not navigate the settings with the mouse. This screams to me like a bare-bones console port. Hell, even the settings are listed as High quality, Balanced, and Efficiency.

Blades of Fireplace doesn’t function a built-in benchmark device. So, for our exams, we used this space. This gave the impression to be one of the demanding we might discover early within the sport. It additionally exposes some terrible CPU bottleneck points that we’ll focus on. Because the sport doesn’t have a TAA/Native setting, we’ve used AMD FSR 3.0 at 100% on all of our GPUs.

At 1080p/High quality Settings, all of our GPUs had been capable of present a easy gaming expertise besides of 1. Proper now, the sport performs HORRIBLY on the AMD Radeon RX 9070XT. To place issues into perspective, the AMD Radeon RX 7900XTX is 128% quicker than the RX 9070XT. And that’s not all. The AMD Radeon RX 6900XT is 88% quicker than the RX 9070XT. That is probably a driver challenge that AMD should repair.

To show my claims, listed below are two screenshots from the very same location. The primary one is with the AMD Radeon RX 9070XT and the second is with the AMD Radeon RX 7900XTX.

As you’ll have additionally observed, the NVIDIA RTX 4090, RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 have been severely restricted by the CPU or the RAM. I’m undecided what’s happening as none of our CPU cores is maxed out. So, this might both be a driver or a RAM challenge.

Now I’d such as you to check out the benchmark scene. This space doesn’t, in any means, justify this sort of efficiency. That is, clearly, a significant optimization challenge that the devs should repair.

What’s additionally fascinating right here is the efficiency on the AMD Radeon RX 7900XTX. This AMD GPU is 38% quicker when it comes to minimal framerates than the aforementioned NVIDIA GPUs.

At 1440p/High quality Settings, you’ll want no less than an NVIDIA RTX 3080. Once more, the AMD Radeon RX 9070XT is unable to supply a easy gaming expertise. Additionally, as soon as once more, our NVIDIA RTX 4090, RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 are bottlenecked.

At 4K/High quality Settings, we lastly get some correct GPU outcomes. Our high three GPUs are capable of present a continuing 60FPS expertise. Furthermore, the AMD Radeon RX 6900XT manages to compete with the AMD Radeon RX 9070XT. So, in the event you personal an AMD Radeon RX 9000 collection GPU, I counsel staying away from this sport till AMD and MercurySteam repair these efficiency points.

Graphics-wise, I used to be not that impressed with Blades of Fireplace. The sport has small environments, and its lighting feels so old-gen-ish. To its credit score, MercurySteam used quite a few high-quality textures. Nevertheless, this sport can not compete with different double-A video games like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Nonetheless Wakes The Deep or No one Desires to Die.

To its credit score, the sport doesn’t seem to endure from any traversal or shader compilation stutters. Nevertheless, there are some framepacing challenge that may happen while you’re shifting the digital camera actually quick. Check out the frametime graph within the following screenshot. It appears to be like terrible, proper? Once more, this challenge happens ONLY in case you are consistently spinning or shifting the digital camera rapidly. Nonetheless, it’s one thing you have to be conscious of.

In all honesty, Blades of Fireplace looks like a bare-bones console port. It doesn’t, in any means, really feel like a PC sport. The devs have compelled an upscaling setting to everybody, the graphics settings are listed as these of consoles, and you can not navigate the menu with the mouse. The sport additionally suffers from main optimization points. Sure, you may brute-force your means as the sport isn’t that demanding. Nevertheless, this doesn’t make it a fantastic PC sport. Plus, it at present performs horribly on the AMD Radeon RX 9000 collection GPUs.

The excellent news right here is that Blades of Fireplace can run easily on a variety of GPUs. And that’s maybe its saving grace. So, in the event you solely care about efficiency, you can be tremendous with it. It’s additionally not a bad-looking sport. Simply make certain to mood your expectations because it received’t additionally impress you with its graphics. Usually talking, although, as a PC sport, it feels lackluster. So, let’s hope that the devs will repair a number of the points we talked about above!

John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He’s a PC gaming fan and extremely helps the modding and indie communities. Earlier than creating DSOGaming, John labored on quite a few gaming web sites. Whereas he’s a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots may be discovered on consoles. John cherished – and nonetheless does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be probably the greatest consoles. Nonetheless, the PC platform received him over consoles. That was primarily resulting from 3DFX and its iconic devoted 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has additionally written the next diploma thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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