With so many games powered by Unreal Engine 5 with its predictable strengths and weaknesses, developer Pearl Abyss deserves kudos for delivering something genuinely new and game-changing. Its proprietary BlackSpace Engine delivers something that's nothing short of remarkable, with an open world like no other thanks to its immense near-field detail and massive scale.

Most of the footage seen so far has been running on PC, but what about consoles? Pearl Abyss was confident enough to hand-deliver PlayStation 5 Pro with a near-final version of the game - and we are not disappointed.

The size and scale of the open world is one thing, but the systems-driven action within this world is frankly staggering. Rather than attempt to describe the experience, I think it's best to let the video do the talking. On the rendering side though, it's the ray-traced diffuse global illumination that takes centre-stage. The highlight of PC remains intact on consoles, driving a dynamic system where sunlight bounces indoors surfaces, while local lights like your character's lantern deliver dramatic real-time shadows.

RT is enabled across all three graphics modes on PS5 Pro, ensuring that the core lighting quality is consistent across the game. It's not quite perfect: the denoiser can occasionally struggle with streaking in high contrast areas, but it's far less intrusive than the boiling effect seen in the recent Resident Evil Requiem. Pearl Abyss also piles on the detail by using displacement mapping at a scale I've never seen before to simulate depth within textures, making every stone and brick explode in detail.

As revealed by Pearl Abyss' recent specs announcement, there are three modes on offer here. There's the optimal (aka performance) mode, balanced and quality, targeting 60fps, 40fps and 30fps respectively. Low base resolutions pre-upscaling has been a problem this generation, but Pearl Abyss aims for 1080p, 1440p and 4K respectively.

The optimal and balanced modes use PSSR to upscale to a 4K output and while you'll see this in action during the video, this is not the final build. We're seeing first-gen PSSR here, not the massively improved "upgraded" version. If the quality holds up per Resident Evil Requiem, the results should impress.

There's also VRR support built into the game - as seen in the public specs sheet, which describes the balanced mode as operating at 48Hz+. And that's a problem because fundamentally, there's no low frame-rate compensation (LFC) support. The game can drop out of the VRR window on the odd occasion, resulting in obvious screen-tearing. It's this element of the game I hope to see improved in future patches as there is full LFC support within the PS5 SDK which would solve this issue.

Fundamentally though, I think people are coming to this piece wondering if the high-end Crimson Desert experience scales down to consoles or not. In terms of GPU scalability, the game works. Yes, the optimal and balanced modes use upscaling, but the base resolution is high enough that even the original PSSR looks fine overall, minus some artefacts that we should expect to see gone with the upgraded PSSR.

In terms of CPU, that was a more pressing concern - today's mid-range PC CPUs are considerably more capable than the consoles. Here, the limitations can be more felt, but never enough to feel that the game is "poorly optimised".

We still need to see more, of course. For PS5 Pro, we want to see the improvements brought about by the upgraded PSSR. Right now I prefer playing the balanced mode, but if the new PSSR is as effective as we think it is, the base 1080p from the optimal mode may still deliver an impressive experience with higher frame-rates. Beyond that, we've yet to see anything on the base PS5 or Xbox Series consoles. Even so, the signs are looking good - and certainly for PS5 Pro owners, Crimson Desert delivers a phenomenal experience.