The First Descendant is the latest FTP (Free to Play) game to hit over 200,000 concurrent players on Steam. Built on Unreal Engine 5, the MMO from Nexon plays very similar to Destiny and Warframe, with superior visuals and many more microtransactions. We have been (trying to) test the game for our next optimization guide, but it’s been a nightmare. Apart from Intel 13th/14th Gen K-series CPU-related crashes, the game’s servers have been shaky, down even now.
Luckily, NVIDIA has benchmarked “The Descendant” on its RTX 40 series GPUs to give us an idea of how it performs. There’s not much out of the ordinary here. Upscaling and/or frame generation is imperative for ray-tracing, although you can get away with just the former on a powerful PC.
At 4K Ultra (RT Ultra), the GeForce RTX 4090 averages a mere 50 FPS. and DLSS 3.5 set to “Performance” mode. Enabling frame generation pushes the RTX 4090 past 120 FPS, followed by the RTX 4080 Super with 37 FPS (100 FPS with FG). The RTX 4070 Ti Super averages 32 FPS at the native resolution, and 86 FPS with DLSS 3.5 “Performance” mode.
At 1440p, the GeForce RTX 4090 averages 80 FPS at 1440p native using the same settings, and 148 FPS with frame generation enabled. The RTX 4080 Super nets 60 FPS and 123 FPS with DLSS 3.5 “Quality.” The RTX 4070 Super averages 48 FPS, with frame generation nearly doubling that number to 95 FPS. The RTX 4070 posts a 40 FPS average, and 79 FPS with upscaling+frame generation enabled.
FHD or 1080p sees the RTX 4060 average a bitter 35.5 FPS only to have DLSS 3.5 “Quality” boost it to 70 FPS. The GeForce RTX 4060 Ti is slightly faster with average framerates of 44.5 FPS at native 1080p, and 87.6 FPS with frame generation enabled. The RTX 4070 maintains an average of 55 FPS and 107.6 FPS with upscaling and interpolation. Lastly, the RTX 4070 Super averages 65 FPS and 126 FPS with DLSS 3.5 enabled.
