Redfall Is a Solid PC Port with Great DLSS 3 Performance

Following the incredibly disappointing release state of several Unreal Engine games, such as Respawn’s Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, it is only natural for gamers to wonder about Redfall, too.

Over the years, Arkane has mostly worked with its own Void Engine, a heavily modified fork of id Tech 5, except for 2017’s Prey, which was made with Crytek’s CryEngine. Incidentally, one of the DLCs released for Prey, the multiplayer hide-and-seek mode Typhon Hunter, was the studio’s first attempt with Unreal Engine technology.

Redfall is far bigger of a project, though, not to mention the first open world game ever made by Arkane. The concerns of PC gamers are more than warranted, but let me assuage them right away: this is a solid port, with only minimal instances of traversal stuttering that I didn’t find very impactful for my gameplay experience.

The game runs smoothly even without an optimized Game Ready driver, which I expect will be available tomorrow to coincide with the game’s release. Unlike most recent PC releases, Redfall is an NVIDIA-partnered title. That means it comes equipped with both DLSS 2 (Super Resolution and DLSS 3 (Frame Generation).

Since Redfall is an open world game with random encounters and a dynamic day cycle, I’ve compared DLSS 3 on and off in the relatively static setting of the survivors’ fire station. As you can see in the CapFrameX comparison above, the average frame rate on my rig (i7 12700KF, RTX 4090) jumped by over sixty frames, a 58.4% uplift. While not the biggest I’ve seen with DLSS 3, it is definitely in the upper end. The 1% percentile received a similar performance boost of 53.2%, while the 0.2% uplift was more modest but still a sizable 40.8%. Still, even if you do not own a GeForce RTX 40 Series, DLSS 2 on its own should be able to provide a smooth experience at maxed settings. AMD and Intel users will also be happy to know Redfall supports FSR 2.1 and XeSS, respectively.

I’ve captured DLSS 3 performance with CapFrameX during a regular stretch of mixed open world gameplay, including a full Vampire Nest run, and the results were extremely similar for the average frame rate and 0.2% percentile, with only 1% percentile FPS sitting lower than the fire station test.

Graphically, Redfall isn’t the best-looking Unreal Engine game, but it’s still very pretty. Given the performance headroom available on high-end rigs, it is weird that the availability of ray tracing has been delayed to a post-launch patch.

Perhaps the developers were worried that the stuttering would be more pronounced with the ray tracing effects, as seen in Returnal before the patches and the addition of DLSS 3. While we wait for Arkane to add ray tracing, if you find yourself hitting the refresh rate of your monitor, you could try using DLDSR to further improve the image quality by downscaling.

Finally, here’s a look at the relatively basic in-game settings. There’s a field-of-view slider and a motion blur slider, though there’s no slider for vignette or film grain.