ML Denoising Elevates Crimson Desert PC Lighting to Ultra-Quality
Digital Foundry shows that ML-based denoisers from Nvidia (DLSS ray reconstruction) and AMD (FSR Redstone) dramatically improve Crimson Desert PC lighting, restoring directional light, shadows, and reflections even with low ray-count RT, effectively delivering an ultra-quality lighting look at the cost of performance (roughly 14% hit on RTX 5080 and 24% on RX 9070 XT with FSR 4). AMD's solution can look sub-native when not integrated with upscaling, while Nvidia's has some pre-launch bugs (displacement offset, rain disappearance). Despite occasional flicker and pop-in, ML denoising is transformative and underscores ML's role in future games.