Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is among the highest-rated games of 2025. Usually, I don’t care much about critic ratings for various reasons, but the game is also a hit among Steam’s picky audience. With a concurrent player count of over 100K, Expedition 33 sits up there with blockbusters like Baldur’s Gate 3, Oblivion Remastered, and Schedule I. Here’s how the game performs on the latest GPUs. For an optimization guide, go here.
Test Setup
- CPU: Intel Core i9-12900K @ 5.3 GHz.
- Cooler: Arctic Liquid Freezer III 420.
- GPU: NVIDIA RTX 4090 FE.
- Motherboard: MSI PRO Z790-P WIFI.
- Memory: 16 GB x2 @ 6000 MT/s CL30.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 – 1080p Benchmarks
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 performs well for an Unreal Engine 5 game, averaging 50 FPS on the GeForce RTX 3060 at 1080p “Epic” quality with DLSS upscaling. The RTX 4060 Ti stays well over the 60 FPS mark, averaging 71 FPS, with 1% lows of 55.5 FPS.
The GeForce RTX 4090 leads the pack with an average of 132 FPS, followed by the RTX 4080 Super and the RTX 5070 Ti with 125 FPS and 119 FPS, respectively. These beasties don’t get to stretch their claws here due to a CPU limitation.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 – 1440p Benchmarks
The RTX 3060 fails to produce desirable frame rates at 1440p. The RTX 4060 Ti is the baseline, averaging 60 FPS and 48 FPS lows. The RTX 4070 nets 80 FPS, 88 FPS for the RTX 4070 Ti, and 100+ FPS for the rest of the top-tier cards.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 – 4K Benchmarks
The GeForce RTX 4070 is the entry-level part at 4K, averaging 58 FPS, right behind the RTX 4070 Ti (66 FPS). The RTX 5070 Ti leads by 38%, and the RTX 4090 by 64%.
Interestingly, the frame rate deficit between the RTX 4080 Super and the 4080 Super is still a meager 10-15%, highlighting potential optimization issues. Like most UE5 titles, Expedition 33 isn’t CPU bottlenecked, so this is likely a GPU-side problem.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 VRAM Usage
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 uses up to 10 GB of graphics memory at 4K “Epic,” which drops to 9 GB at 1440p and 8 GB at 1080p. Upscaling shaves off a few hundred MBs from that figure. Lowering the texture quality reduces the VRAM usage by 1-2 GB.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Conclusion
Expedition 33 performs better than most Unreal Engine 5 titles. That’s remarkable considering it takes full advantage of the UE5 suite, including Lumen, Nanite, Niagara, Virtual Shadows, etc. There are a bunch of visual artifacts due to low GI and reflection resolution, but they aren’t easy to spot. And let’s not forget, this is a game by an indie studio after all.
