TiMi Studio Group has just released the Black Hawk Down campaign for Delta Force for free to everyone. Powered by Unreal Engine 5, it’s time now 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, 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 572.47, and the Radeon Adrenalin Edition 25.2.1 drivers.
Team Jade has added a few graphics settings to tweak. PC gamers can adjust the quality of Global Illumination, Shaders, Textures, Shadows and more. The game also supports NVIDIA DLSS 4, AMD FSR 3.1 and Intel XeSS 2. Yep, this appears to be the first game to support the latest version of XeSS.
Delta Force: Black Hawk Down does not have a built-in benchmark tool. So, for our tests, we used the first in-engine cutscene. This sequence appeared to be more demanding than the first mission. So, consider this a stress test.
For framerates over 60FPS at 1080p/Extreme Settings, the game requires at least six CPU cores. At first glance, you may think that this is fine. However, Black Hawk Down suffers from major stutters. Even the fully unlocked 7950X3D could not brute force its way. Plus, the game cannot scale on CPUs that have over 8 CPU cores.
At 1080p/Extreme Settings, you’ll need a high-end GPU to get framerates over 60FPS at all times. The NVIDIA RTX3080 and the AMD Radeon RX 6900XT could push average framerates over 65FPS, but they were frequently dropping at mid-50s. Moreover, you can clearly see that the RTX 4090, RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 were CPU bottlenecked. As such, it’s a shame that Black Hawk Down cannot use over 8 CPU cores. At least there is support for Frame Gen, something that can greatly help in these CPU-bound situations.
At 1440p/Extreme Settings, you’ll need at least an AMD Radeon RX 7900XTX for over 60FPS. Also, in this game, the NVIDIA RTX 3080 is a bit faster than the AMD Radeon RX 6900XT. The NVIDIA RTX 5080 is also 20-35% faster than the AMD Radeon RX 7900XTX.
Things get a bit more interesting at Native 4K/Extreme Settings. In this resolution, the only GPU that can maintain 60FPS at all times is the NVIDIA RTX 5090. Both the NVIDIA RTX 4090 and the RTX 5080 can push average framerates higher than 60FPS, but they can drop to 45FPS and 36FPS, respectively. Moreover, the minimum framerate of the AMD Radeon RX 7900XTX is better than that of the NVIDIA RTX 5080.
Now as you may have noticed, we benchmarked the Extreme Settings. Delta Force: Black Hawk Down also has some Ultimate Settings that can push even the RTX 5090 to its limits. At Native 4K/Ultimate Settings, we were getting a minimum of 33FPS and an average of 36FPS. As for the rest of the graphics presets, you can gain back some performance by lowering the settings to Ultra or High. On Medium and Low settings, we were CPU-bound.
To be honest, Delta Force: Black Hawk Down is kind of a mess right now. The game opens a new separate program for the campaign and Delta Force is still running in the background. From what I’ve seen, the default DF program constantly uses one CPU core. As I said, the game also suffers from major stutters. Not only that but I experienced some weird texture streaming issues (as some objects had low-quality textures and it took a while for the game to load the high-res versions).
Graphics-wise, Black Hawk Down looks great, mainly thanks to its amazing lighting. This is another game in which Lumen shines. So, it’s a shame that the game is plagued by all the aforementioned issues. There is a lot of potential here. Sadly, though, you’ll need a high-end PC system with DLSS Frame Gen to somehow enjoy it. And that’s a bummer.
Before closing, I should note that this is NOT an offline or single-player campaign. This is a Co-Op Online Campaign. You can play it solo, however the game won’t adjust its difficulty. Plus, it does not have any checkpoints. So, once you die, you’ll have to restart the mission. I don’t know what Team Jade was thinking. However, this isn’t the campaign we were promised. It almost feels like a bait and switch. Ah well, guess that explains why it’s free.
All in all, Delta Force: Black Hawk Down suffers from major issues on PC. The game cannot take full advantage of modern-day CPUs and it will bottleneck a lot of people even at 1080p. Furthermore, it suffers from major stuttering issues. And then we have the ridiculous co-op and online requirements. It’s a shame because graphically, it does look great. However, Team Jade will have to put a lot of work in order to polish it. Because, right now, Black Hawk Down is a mess!
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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