NEXON has just released its latest Souls/Sekiro-inspired game, The First Berserker: Khazan. Powered by Unreal Engine 4, it’s time to benchmark it and examine its performance on the 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, as well as NVIDIA’s RTX 2080Ti, RTX 3080, RTX 4090, RTX 5080 and RTX 5090. We also used Windows 10 64-bit, the GeForce 572.83, and the Radeon Adrenalin Edition 25.3.2 drivers.
NEOPLE has added a respectable amount of graphics settings to tweak. PC gamers can adjust the quality of Textures, Shadows, Vegetation, Reflections and more. The game also supports NVIDIA DLSS 4 (via the NVIDIA App). However, it does not support the latest versions of FSR or XeSS. Instead, it supports AMD FSR 2.0 and Intel XeSS. Plus, there is no support for Ray Tracing.
The First Berserker: Khazan is a GPU-bound title. At 1080p/Max Settings, the game can run with over 100FPS on all of our GPUs. Yes, even the NVIDIA RTX 2080Ti can push framerates at around 110-120FPS. Even at 1440p/Max Settings, the NVIDIA RTX 2080Ti can provide a smooth gaming experience.
At Native 4K/Max Settings, we finally start getting some more interesting results. At that res, we see the AMD Radeon RX 6900XT outperforming the NVIDIA RTX 3080. The AMD Radeon RX 9070XT is 17% slower than the AMD Radeon RX 7900XTX. Speaking of the RX 7900XTX, it came really close to the performance of the NVIDIA RTX 5080. To be more precise, the RX 7900XTX was 7-9% slower than the NVIDIA RTX 5080.
Graphics-wise, The First Berserker: Khazan looks great. NEOPLE has used high-resolution textures, and the game’s “anime” art style can mask some of its visual shortcomings. There are some cool particle effects, as well as some great snow deformation effects. Plus, the environments are quite atmospheric. I really don’t have anything to complain about. Sure, this game does not push next-gen visuals. However, it packs the perfect balance between visuals and performance.
Before closing, I should note that The First Berserker: Khazan suffers from traversal stutters. This is an issue that also plagued its demo. So, it’s kind of a bummer that the devs have not done anything at all to resolve it. Thankfully, there aren’t any shader compilation stutters. But man, you’ll see some big and annoying stutters during your playthrough. In fact, you can see some of them in the following video.
All in all, The First Berserker: Khazan does not require a high-end PC system. Sadly, though, it suffers from some awful traversal stutters. At this point, I don’t expect the devs to ever address them. After all, they had over two months to fix them (as the game’s demo also had them and it came out in January). That’s a shame because other than that, The First Berserker: Khazan is a really polished product on PC!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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