Crimson Desert looks great in general, but it suffers from a fairly extreme amount of ghosting in certain situations, and the player base is now making a note of that. Though Crimson Desert is renowned for its graphics, among other things, there's no denying that it's far from perfect in that respect, and ghosting in particular can be a hard problem for players to deal with.
Crimson Desert looks and runs reasonably well for what it is, given the scope and complexity of the game as a whole. Instead of relying on off-the-shelf options like Unreal Engine 5, developer Pearl Abyss has chosen to use its own in-house Black Space engine. Black Space was built on top of the studio's prior Black Desert Engine, as seen in Black Desert Online, and it's proven to be an impressively flexible bit of kit. Its rendering suffers from many of the same problems most other modern game engines suffer from, however, such as ghosting.
Crimson Desert's Ghosting Problems Are a Big Deal
Though it's not the first time someone has brought up ghosting in the context of Crimson Desert, the problem was brought into the limelight again when one PlayStation 5 player posted a Reddit video showing it in practice. Ghosting is an artifact of the modern game's rendering technology, which relies on cross-frame temporal data for image stability. The effect is that of excessive after-imaging that is particularly visible in high-contrast and low-light areas. As there are no apparent plans to reduce ghosting in Crimson Desert's next big update, it's likely to remain a problem for the foreseeable future.
Crimson Desert's ghosting problem is entirely platform-agnostic, though some settings can alleviate it to an extent. PC players enjoying Crimson Desert can rely on the platform's wealth of graphics utilities to see what settings work best for them. Nvidia users, for example, can give Ray Reconstruction a shot, which helps albeit at a substantial performance cost. Disabling upscaling technologies like DLSS and FSR may also help, as upscaling can exacerbate pre-existing ghosting issues by a fair bit. This, too, comes at a performance cost, however, and it might not help all that much.
While PC players can at least fiddle around with Crimson Desert's graphics settings to see which options reduce ghosting on their setup, this isn't really the case for console players. While Crimson Desert opens up some console settings to tweak, they largely won't change how ghosting works or how players perceive it. Switching over to Quality Mode with a lower target frame-rate is definitely worth giving a shot, in any case.
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This article originally appeared on GameRant and is republished here with permission.
