The bulk of Crimson Desert’s walls is silhouette parallax from 2015

With sales past 4 million, technical artists pulled apart why walls in Crimson Desert look solid without a frame drop. It is not real geometry displacement, and it is not basic parallax occlusion, which leaves a flat edge. Building corners here are bulky.

The method is Silhouette Parallax Occlusion Mapping: an illusion of a complex edge with pixel shaders, without new polygons. CryEngine used it more than 10 years ago, and the feature appeared in Unreal Engine 4 in 2015. In BlackSpace that explains the speed and the side effect, texture flicker on PC.

The YouTube breakdown.