Last month, NEXON released its third-person looter shooter, The First Descendant, on PC. Powered by Unreal Engine 5, it’s time now to benchmark it and examine its performance on PC.

For our benchmarks, we used an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 32GB of DDR5 at 6000Mhz, AMD’s Radeon RX580, RX Vega 64, RX 6900XT, RX 7900XTX, NVIDIA’s GTX980Ti, RTX 2080Ti, RTX 3080 and RTX 4090. We also used Windows 10 64-bit, the GeForce 556.12, and the Radeon Adrenalin Edition 24.6.1 drivers. Moreover, we’ve disabled the second CCD on our 7950X3D.

NEXON has added a few graphics settings to tweak. PC gamers can adjust the quality of Visibility, Shadows, Textures, Reflections, Vegetation and more. The game also supports Ray Tracing, as well as NVIDIA DLSS 3 and AMD FSR 3.0. We have separate articles for them, so be sure to check them out.

The First Descendant does not have a built-in benchmark tool. Therefore, for both our CPU and GPU benchmarks, we used its hub area. This area appeared to be taxing both the CPU and the GPU. As such, it can give us a pretty good idea of how the rest of the game performs. We also lowered our resolution to 720p for our CPU tests (so that we could avoid any possible GPU bottleneck).

To see how the game runs with different types of CPUs, we simulated dual-core, quad-core, and hexa-core CPUs. And from what we saw, The First Descendant is the first game that can take advantage of eight CPU threads. At 720p/Epic Settings, our eight-core CPU was 14-17% faster than our simulated hexa-core CPU.

It’s also interesting to witness the behavior of SMT on these various CPU configurations. SMT/Hyper-Threading can improve performance on CPU with 2 or 4 cores. However, it will slightly lower performance on CPUs with 6 or 8 cores.

At 1080p/Epic Settings, you’ll need an equivalent to the NVIDIA RTX 3080 to get a constant 60fps experience. On Epic Settings, the game uses Lumen, something that explains these performance numbers.

At 1440p/Epic Settings, only the AMD Radeon RX 7900XTX and the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 were able to provide a smooth gaming experience. The AMD Radeon RX 6900XT was able to push an average of 70fps, but it could drop to 40fps at times. As for Native 4K/Epic Settings, there is no GPU that can offer 60fps at all times.

Graphics-wise, The First Descendant looks great. Since it uses Nanite, the pop-in is kept at a minimum. Lumen is also doing a good job of making the environments look great. The devs have also used a lot of high-resolution textures, and the main characters look really detailed. There is really nothing to complain about here.

Sadly, though, it suffers from noticeable stuttering issues. These are most likely traversal stutters (as the game has a shader compilation process before loading its map). So, that’s a bummer.

All in all, The First Descendant performs similarly to other UE5 games. For native resolutions, you’ll need a high-end GPU, especially for gaming at 1440p or 4K. However, since DLSS and FSR look great here, we suggest using them. The First Descendant is also one of the few PC games that can use up to eight CPU threads. This was a pleasant surprise as UE5 has been known for its awful CPU multithreading capabilities.

Enjoy!