Dune: Awakening is shaping up to be the next big MMO, taking elements from Rust, Conan Exiles, and their peers. Since its release earlier this week, the game has consistently maintained around 100K concurrent players on Steam. Built on the Unreal Engine 5, it leverages Lumen GI and Virtual Shadows to improve lighting and shadow quality. Here’s how it performs on the latest graphics cards.
Test Setup
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7950X
- Cooler: Arctic Liquid Freezer III 420.
- GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 FE.
- Motherboard: MSI B850 Edge WiFi.
- Memory: 16 GB x2 @ 6000 MT/s CL30.
Dune Awakening 1080p Benchmarks
Dune Awakening performs well on most PCs (targeting 60 FPS). A few quality reductions and upscaling should be enough to get you there. However, higher refresh rates like 120 FPS or 144 FPS aren’t possible without frame generation.
Dune runs into a CPU bottleneck near 100 FPS on midrange CPUs. The AMD Ryzen 9 7950X maxes out at 94 FPS at 1080p using the GeForce RTX 4090. The RTX 4080 Super and the 5070 Ti hover around 90 FPS, while the 4070 Ti yields 80 FPS. The RTX 4070 nets 68 FPS, followed by the 5060 Ti with 63 FPS.
Dune Awakening 1440p Benchmarks
The CPU bottleneck becomes less apparent at 1440p, distinguishing the GeForce RTX 4090 from the rest. The Lovelace flagship (84 FPS) is 20-25% faster than the RTX 4080 Super (73 FPS) and the 5070 Ti (69 FPS).
The GeForce RTX 5070 Ti is 19% faster than the 4070 Ti at 1440p. The RTX 4070 Ti averages 58.5 FPS, leading the 4070 (53 FPS) by 11% and the 5060 Ti (44 FPS) by 33%.
Dune Awakening 4K Benchmarks
Dune is completely GPU-bound at 4K. The GeForce RTX 4090 (52 FPS) performs unhindered, leading the RTX 4080 Super (41 FPS) by 26% and the 5070 Ti (39 FPS) by 33%. The GeForce RTX 4070 averages only 30 FPS, while the 4070 Ti manages 34 FPS at 4K.
Dune Awakening: VRAM Usage
Dune: Awakening goes easy on the VRAM. It peaks at 10 GB at 4K using the highest quality settings, dropping to 8.5 to 9 GB at lower presets.
QHD 1440p and 1080p use 8.5 GB and 8 GB of VRAM at the maximum quality settings (without virtual shadows).
Dune Awakening: CPU Bottlenecks
Intel’s 12th Gen and AMD’s Ryzen 7000 CPUs are majorly bottlenecked around 100 FPS. The Core i7-14700K is around 10% faster than the Core i9-12900K and 7% faster than the Ryzen 9 7950X at 1080p.
The deficits shrink to 7% and 4% at 1440p as the game becomes more GPU-bound.
We recorded a GPU-busy deviation of 10-15% at native 1080p. Similar figures are observed at 4K using performance upscaling and 1440p with balanced upscaling.
The CPU bottleneck becomes severe at upscaled 1080p. The GPU-Busy deviation increases to 20-30%, limiting most midrange processors to under 100 FPS without frame generation.
