Yesterday, Bethesda and Microsoft released Redfall on PC. Powered by Unreal Engine 4, it’s time now to benchmark it and see how it performs on the PC platform.
For this PC Performance Analysis, 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 531.79 and the Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition 23.4.3 drivers.
Arkane has added a few graphics settings to tweak. PC gamers can adjust the quality of Anti-Aliasing, Effects, Foliage, Shading, Shadows, Textures, and View Distance. The game also supports all PC upscaling techniques. In other words, there is support for NVIDIA DLSS 3, AMD FSR 2.1 and Intel XeSS. Moreover, there is a FOV slider.
Redfall does not feature any built-in benchmark tool. Thus, for both our CPU and GPU benchmarks, we used the following sequence. In this sequence, we explore one of the game’s environments, and then focus our attention on the gas station which has numerous enemies. This should give us a pretty good idea of how the rest of the game performs.
In order to find out how the game scales on multiple CPU threads, we simulated a dual-core, a quad-core and a hexa-core CPU. We also disabled the second CCD on our AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D. Unfortunately, we could not test the game on our i9 9900K system as the game was crashing upon logging in to its server. This is the second always-online game using Unreal Engine 4 with Denuvo that exhibits this behavior.
Redfall does not appear to require a high-end CPU for gaming with 60fps. Our simulated dual-core system was able to push an average of 78fps, though it was dropping below 50fps due to the game’s traversal stutters. However, once we enabled SMT, we were able to get framerates higher than 84fps at all times. It’s also worth noting that SMT brought a small performance hit on our hexa-core and octa-core systems.
What really shocked us with Redfall was its performance on AMD’s hardware. An AMD Radeon RX 6900XT was significantly faster than the NVIDIA RTX 3080, and the RX 7900XTX was able to match (and even surpass in low resolutions) the NVIDIA RTX 4090. This game loves AMD’s hardware.
At 1080p/Epic Settings, most of our GPUs were able to provide a smooth gaming experience. An AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 has no trouble at all pushing over 70fps at all times.
At 144p/Epic Settings, our five most powerful GPUs were able to run the game with over 60fps. And as for native 4K/Epic Settings, our RX 6900XT, RX 7900XTX, and NVIDIA RTX 4090 had no trouble at all running it.
As said, Redfall suffers from numerous traversal stutters. These stutters are worse than those found in Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, and all of you will definitely notice/feel them. Needless to say that these stutters are also present on consoles. Speaking of which, and given the game’s performance on PC, I really don’t know why the game is locked at 30fps on Xbox Series X.
Graphics-wise, Redfall looks awful. The game’s dynamic shadows look bad and pixel-y, and there are major pop-in issues. Seriously, even on Epic Settings, you’ll be seeing objects changing their detail quality right in front of view. Its lighting is also nowhere close to what we’ve seen in other UE4 games. Redfall looks like an old-gen game, and not like a current-gen title. This is a big letdown, so don’t expect to be amazed by its visuals.
All in all, Redfall performs quite well on PC, especially on AMD’s GPUs. NVIDIA RTX40 owners can also take advantage of DLSS 3 in order to further improve their performance. We also did not experience any mouse acceleration issues. There are, however, different mouse sensitivity settings/values for ADS. And while the game can run well on PC (excluding the traversal stutters obviously which are present on all platforms), it looks horrendous!
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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