Microids has lifted the review embargo for Empire of the Ants, which will be released in a few days. 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 566.03, and the Radeon Adrenalin Edition 24.10.1 drivers. Moreover, we’ve disabled the second CCD on our 7950X3D.

Tower Five has added a few graphics settings to tweak. PC gamers can adjust the quality of Global Illumination, Textures, Foliage, Insects and more. According to the devs, the game supports both Lumen and Nanite. However, they have not used Lumen for the reflections (all reflections are SSR). Moreover, the game does not have support for Native Resolutions. Instead, the game will use by default UE5’s TSR. And for the NVIDIA RTX gamers, there is support for DLSS 3 Super Resolution and Frame Generation.

Empire of the Ants does not have a built-in benchmark tool. So, for our benchmarks, we used the starting area. From what we could see, this was representative of the early parts of the game.

At 1080p/High, the game can run with over 60FPS on a wide range of GPUs. Strangely, enough, there is a 120FPS max framerate lock. Moreover, the game would constantly crash to desktop on the AMD Radeon RX 580 and the NVIDIA GTX 980Ti. The official PC requirements list the AMD RX 580, so I don’t know why it was crashing on that GPU.

At 1440p/High Settings, you’ll need an equivalent of the NVIDIA RTX 3080 to get framerates higher than 60FPS. Those owning a G-Sync monitor will also be able to get a smooth gaming experience on the NVIDIA RTX 2080Ti.

Finally, at 4K/High Settings, the only GPU that was able to run the game with over 60FPS was the NVIDIA RTX 4090. Thankfully, those with a FreeSync monitor will also get a smooth gaming experience on the AMD Radeon RX 7900XTX.

Graphics-wise, Empire of the Ants looks great. Thanks to Nanite, there isn’t any pop-in for objects. The game’s lighting also looks great thanks to Lumen. The devs have also used a lot of high-quality textures. There is seriously nothing to complain about here. This is another example of why devs have decided to use UE5 in their games. Thanks to its capabilities, small studios can take advantage of it and create games that look incredible. Oh, and contrary to other UE5-powered games, it can run smoothly on a wide range of GPUs. Not only that, but I did not notice any stuttering issues.

All in all, Empire of the Ants looks and runs great on PC. This is a great example of a small-budget game punching above its weight. Not only does it look great, but it can also run smoothly on a wide range of PC systems. It also puts to shame other UE5 games that suffer from stuttering issues. If this game does not have any, then other games from studios bigger than Tower Five shouldn’t have any either. Everything looks and feels top-notch here, so kudos to the devs.

Enjoy!