Digital Foundry tried the Crimson Desert CES demo

On the DF Direct Weekly recap of CES 2026, Digital Foundry’s Alex Battaglia called the Crimson Desert demo at AMD’s booth the show’s standout. He also noted that Pearl Abyss is running it on the in-house BlackSpace Engine rather than Unreal Engine 5.

He singled out lighting he described as path-traced global illumination, a long draw distance with little use of stand-in models, and particle water that actually flows and changes height instead of only waving a mesh.

The demo ran at native 4K on a Ryzen 7 9850X3D and a Radeon RX 9070 XT at about 40–50 frames per second. For the March 2026 launch on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, the studio is promising FSR 4 Redstone, frame generation and ray reconstruction.