The new Crimson Desert patches are grand and all, but the Ray Reconstruction performance and lighting options are still all kind of b0rked on my machine

I've been having a grand old time running around Crimson Desert's gigantic open world, picking up sheep, committing crimes, and generally making a nuisance of myself to the good citizens of Pywel. I've been playing it since launch day, in fact, which is why I'm not surprised I've found myself awash among a sea of graphics-related issues.

Chief of which, to my mind at least, is the absolutely godawful Ray Reconstruction performance. The problem here is that it's tied to the lighting setting, which means enabling it forces the ray tracing to its absolute maximum—and it absolutely tanks the frame rate as a result.

I'm talking less than half the frames with the setting enabled compared to one step below, using an RTX 5070 Ti. But hey, you can always turn it off, right?

Sure, and thanks to some recent patches, the "neon-green grass" issue with RR off and the lighting set to one step below maximum looks to be much improved.

Aside from some much nicer-looking trees, my brief testing with the most recent version seems to indicate there's not a massive difference anymore between the settings when roaming the open world—as opposed to release, when RR sometimes made it look like a totally different game.

Image on the left is with Cinematic settings, Ray Reconstruction on, lighting forced to Maximum. On the right is Cinematic settings only.

However, with Ray Reconstruction off and the lighting set to Cinematic (where the ray tracing is left at a performance-friendly level), I've been experiencing some very odd visual bugs, particularly with shiny objects.

And by bugs, I mean some horrendous-looking armour. This would be fine if you weren't wearing it all the time, but as a Crimson Desert helm-enjoyer, I'd rather some of the armour models looked like the shiny, boutique objects they're supposed to be rather than low-poly PS4 assets—and it's not just me that's experiencing the issue. Allow me to demonstrate:

Image on the left is with Cinematic settings, Ray Reconstruction on, lighting forced to Maximum. On the right is Cinematic settings only.

Yeah, that's pretty damn ugly by comparison. This is with motion blur off and my character standing mostly still (albeit with an idle animation), too, which suggests something real buggy is going on here. All of this has been recorded using the latest Steam patch, which promises to fix some of the visual nasties. Top of the list is Ray Reconstruction blurriness, apparently.

To be honest, I hadn't noticed the ray-reconstructed image to be particularly Vaseline-like in actual gameplay. In fact, I'd say that Crimson Desert's image quality is particularly noisy overall, no matter the settings. This is made worse by the fact that, to get it to run well at 4K with Ray Reconstruction on, I've resorted to enabling DLSS Performance mode.

That's not normally a huge issue for me (I'm running an RTX 5070 Ti after all, not an RTX 5090), but given that the ray traced lighting is based on the pre-upscaled (low-resolution) output, it sure makes for some noisy moments once the upscaler gets involved.

Check out the pronounced "boiling" effect around Kliff's floppy sleeves and silhouette in the clip below to see what I mean.

I've had plenty of experience with DLSS running in Performance mode through its various iterations, and this game's visuals seem to give it the most trouble. A previous patch changed the DLSS Ray Reconstruction preset from D to E, which supposedly fixed some displacement mapping issues, improved the overall quality of the visuals, and fixed some texture animation quirks.

And to my eyes it looks... a bit worse, actually. The new preset seems to struggle with fast movement at Performance settings—and given that turning down the lighting by a single step seems to do a number on the shiny stuff for myself and others, and that we'll likely be enabling RR and using DLSS to compensate, it's a bit of a poor show overall.

It's all very... messy. Still, the recent patches have fixed a host of other issues, and the game is, in my opinion, a whole ton of fun. Ordinarily, this sort of setting juggling and visual artifacting would spoil my enjoyment of a game, but there's so much bizarre creativity to enjoy in Crimson Desert, I'm powering on regardless with a big grin on my face.

Given that Pearl Abyss seem to be making a herculean effort towards patch support, I've got my fingers crossed that there are more visual and performance improvements yet to come. Here's hoping, at the very least.