Crimson Desert PS5 vs PS5 Pro Performance Compared

There’s been no shortage of speculation surrounding Crimson Desert’s performance on PlayStation 5. Pearl Abyss’s upcoming title has been lauded for its visuals, with some even calling it the best-looking game of 2026 so far. But when you factor in the game’s scale and mechanical complexity, it’s hard not to worry about how it’ll perform on consoles.

While the PS5 has held its own in many demanding titles, games such as Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth and Black Myth Wukong have caused some issues for Sony’s console. In contrast, the PS5 Pro has powered through almost every game thrown at it, but only a handful of titles have leveraged the true capabilities of the machine.

With the Crimson Desert release date drawing close, we’ve examined how the game performs on both versions of the PS5, including an overview of all the graphical modes on offer.

Crimson Desert PS5 vs PS5 Pro Graphics Modes

As confirmed by Pearl Abyss, here are the graphics modes available in Crimson Desert’s PS5 and PS5 Pro versions:

Evidently, Crimson Deserts fares well on the PS5, no matter if you’re using the base or the Pro variant. Of course, the more powerful hardware offers the best experience possible, but the standard version also has a strong range of graphics modes to pick from.

For the time being, it seems like Balanced Mode will be the sweet spot between visuals and performance in Crimson Desert on PS5. It’ll be interesting to see how well FSR 3.0 is implemented and whether the output struggles with aliasing and artifacting. We’ll be sure to update this section with our first impressions as soon as the game goes live. Until then, check out the complete Crimson Desert console specs for a detailed breakdown of its graphics modes on PlayStation and Xbox.

Crimson Desert: What Advantages Does PS5 Pro Offer Over Base PS5?

The PlayStation 5 Pro offers two main advantages over the base PS5 when it comes to Crimson Desert. For starters, it packs a lot more graphical brawn, allowing the devs to extract 4K, Ultra Raytracing gameplay without using any upscaling techniques. The second, and arguably most important advantage, is the support for “Upgraded PSSR,” or PSSR 2.0.

Sony’s proprietary upscaling technique recently received a major upgrade and is now being implemented in numerous games. We’ve already seen what this tech can achieve in Resident Evil Requiem, which was excellent in both visuals and performance. Crimson Desert is no exception, as relayed by a Digital Foundry report, which presented raw gameplay and measured framerates in a variety of scenarios.

Their findings were positive for the most part. Crimson Desert holds a steady 60 FPS on the PS5 Pro, but can occasionally dip into the 30s when there are a ton of enemies on-screen. Moreover, this version offers dynamic RT global illumination and reflections across all graphics modes. It’s also worth highlighting that DF were assessing an older version of the build, which is yet to receive the Upgraded PSSR update.

Based on these details, it does seem likely that the PS5 Pro will be the best console version of Crimson Desert. We’ll be sure to update this post with a definitive judgment when the game is released.

And that wraps the performance comparison between Crimson Desert on the PS5 and PS5 Pro. Which console will you be playing the game on? Let us know in the comments.