Stellar Blade - PC performance graphics benchmarks of Graphics Cards and Processors
We have tested Stellar Blade on maximum graphics settings with video cards of the GeForce RTX 20, 30, 40 and 50 series, as well as Radeon RX 6000, 7000 and 9000. Also, during the tests we conducted, we assessed the quality of the graphic display of the game itself.
| THE GRAFICAL PART |
This subsection of our review highlights the main graphical aspects of this game. Particular attention is paid to the version of the graphics engine used, the version of the API used, graphic settings and the quality of development of the main visual aspects.
| Supported OS and Graphics API |
Stellar Blade — a techno-fantasy action game with an emphasis on dynamic battles, futuristic environments, and high visual density. The game uses DirectX 12 and requires a 64-bit system with a modern processor and at least 16 GB of RAM. Despite being available to users with mid-range video cards, it is advisable to play on a configuration closer to the recommended one for a full visual experience.
System Requirements
The minimum
• OS: Windows 10 (64 bit)
• Processor: Intel Core i5-7600K / AMD Ryzen 5 1600X
• RAM: 16 GB
• Video card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 (6 GB) / AMD Radeon RX 580 (8 GB)
• DirectX: 12
• Storage: 75GB (HDD supported, SSD recommended)
• Settings: Low graphics, target 60 FPS, resolution 1080p
Recommended
• OS: Windows 10 (64 bit)
• Processor: Intel Core i5-8400 / AMD Ryzen 5 3600X
• RAM: 16 GB
• Video card: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER / AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT
• DirectX: 12
• Storage: 75GB (SSD required)
• Settings: Graphics Medium, Target 60 FPS, Resolution 1440p
| DEVELOPMENT HISTORY |
Stellar Blade — is the project with which Shift Up studio first entered the AAA console games market. Development began in 2019 under the working title Project EVE, and from the very beginning the game was created on Unreal Engine 4. Not 5, not a hybrid, but the fourth version of the engine - with all its pros and cons. Despite the visual level and some rumors in the media, the game is 100% assembled and optimized on the old but proven UE4 engine. The developers did not take risks with new systems (Nanite, Lumen, etc.), but squeezed the maximum out of the familiar tools.
The project started as an independent internal initiative within Shift Up. Inspired by Japanese slashers like NIER: Automata и Bayonetta, game director Kim Hyun-tae decided to make something that could compete visually with large Japanese action games, but at the same time not lose its Korean identity. The first prototypes worked on an early build of UE4.20, then gradually the project switched to a more stable build of UE4.26. The game's architecture initially provided for support for 60 frames per second, a fixed resolution, dense geometry of locations and cinematic staging of battles.
Shift Up has been looking for an external partner for a long time. In 2020–2021, the company considered several Asian and Western publishers, but in the end, Sony became interested in the project. The concluded agreement allowed the studio to gain access to the capabilities of the PS5 and adapt the game to all the console's signature features. This meant that the PS4 and Xbox One versions were canceled. And the game became a Sony exclusive - with a guarantee of a release within the AAA class and full technical support.
For a long time, the game remained in "quiet development". The first real gameplay was shown only in 2021. Even then, it became clear that the visual part significantly exceeded the typical level of projects on UE4 - and not due to engine innovations, but due to excellent optimization, attention to detail, manual work with lighting, geometry and animations. In 2022, the project received its final name - Stellar Blade, and in 2023 the developers announced that the release would take place in 2024.
However, the path to release was difficult. The game was postponed several times - first from 2023 to early 2024, then from March to April. The main reason was the desire to eliminate bugs, optimize combat and bring cutscenes to television quality. The final build was compiled on a stable version UE4.26 with its own add-ons, including custom animation pipelines and lighting effects. There is no ray tracing in the game, path tracing is also absent. All graphics are built on baked lighting, SSGI and manual work with shadows and reflections.
| GRAPHICS |
Visually Stellar Blade can easily fool even an experienced player. Many people thought from the trailers and screenshots that the game runs on UE5, but this is not the case. All graphics are built on UE4 squeezed to the max — no Nanite, no Lumen, no ray tracing. The visual level is achieved solely through the skill of the artists, the competent use of materials, procedural shaders and custom post-processing.
Instead of dynamic global illumination, a manually baked lightmap is used here, with shadow mattes that create a soft light and shadow effect. All reflections are screen-based (SSR), sometimes masked by fake light sources. Character materials are assembled from several layers: a skin shader with translucence is used for the skin, and reflective surfaces with separate roughness and specular maps are used for the suits. None of this works automatically — it is the result of dozens of manual adjustment iterations.
The level design is focused on clear separation of locations: each zone is a separate loading block where you can tightly control the lighting, fog effect, contrast, draw distance and the number of NPCs. Thanks to this, Shift Up achieved incredible stability: even in complex scenes, the frame rate on the PS5 barely drops. The limitation of depth is a conscious choice: instead of a large, empty world, there are dense, dense corridors.
The cut scenes are especially well-developed. The facial animations are done manually, with a facial rig system tailored to a specific model (made based on a 3D scan of a Korean actress). The emotions, facial expressions, and gestures in the dialogues are done at the level of Japanese RPGs. final Fantasy. Cutscenes are rendered in real time - they are not pre-rendered, and this is one of the game's greatest strengths.
The heroine's costumes are controversial, but technically, this is one of the highest quality implementations of cloth and body simulation in the game. Hair has its own simulation layer. And the physics of the chest, cape and accessories are implemented via PhysX + a custom spring system. All this works at a stable framerate and without bugs, which is an achievement in itself.
The PC version adds DLSS 2 and XeSS, but does not include any path tracing. Resolution is scaled with the usual temporal upscale, there are no UE5 features - and there cannot be, because the engine has not changed. The game visually surpasses many projects on UE5 only because a team of professionals worked on each frame.
| GAME ENGINE |
Stellar Blade developed on Unreal Engine 4, and this is important. Despite the visual similarity with the new generation projects, the engine does not have Nanite, Lumen and other flagship features of UE5. Instead, it has the maximum potential of UE4, reinforced by the author's developments of the Shift Up studio, including custom shaders, camera modifications and a complex animation system. This is not just an "outdated base", but a powerful technical platform, fine-tuned for the needs of a specific game.
Let's start with the main thing - optimization and stability. UE4 is a mature engine, tested over decades by hundreds of projects, and that is why the developers opted for it. It is much more predictable in terms of performance, easier to debug, and the content creation pipeline is set up to automatism. This is especially important for a Korean studio that has no experience with UE5. As a result Stellar Blade runs stably on PS5 at 60 FPS in most situations, with very few drops during crowd scenes. This is already an achievement, considering the amount of detail, lighting, and particle count in combat.
The combat system is based on custom state machine — that is, a set of states that the character model goes through depending on the player's actions. These states are linked via procedures (attack, parry, jump, roll, weapon change). Thanks to UE4 and its own animation library, each scene looks smooth, without jerking — and this is rare for hack'n'slash action games, especially when long chains of combo attacks are involved. The so-called root-motion approach is used here, when the character's movement is built into the animation itself, and not hung by a script — that is why the animations look "heavy", realistic.
Concerning visual implementation, there is no Lumen in the game - instead, an old but polished one is used deferred lighting pipeline, where lighting is processed at the final frame stage. This allows for efficient combination of lights, reflections and bloom effects without much loss of performance. Shift Up developed their own system dynamic environment: locations use a day/night cycle, changing weather conditions and shadow maps with real-time calculations, albeit with some simplifications. A custom post-processing system is also used, which includes advanced motion blur, chromatic aberration and flexible depth blur.
Great attention is paid cameras. UE4 allows you to customize camera behavior with great precision, and in Stellar Blade Several modes are implemented: a tracking camera for combat, fixed during finishing moves, semi-automatic when running and dynamic in cut scenes. Transitions between them are instant and do not knock the player out of the rhythm. The cinematic camera system is used with cinematic blur, soft focus and a "shaking" lens to enhance the effect of movement.
Working out AI systems — one of the weakest points. Despite the custom enemy behavior patterns, the behavior architecture is based on the standard UE4 BT (Behavior Tree). Enemies work on patterns: attack → rollback → defense. Bosses have scripted phases, but their logic is no more complex than in Souls-like games. The artificial intelligence does not learn and does not react deeply to the environment - it acts according to a predetermined scenario, and therefore may seem superficial on repeated playthroughs. This is not a technical failure, but not the pinnacle of the engine's capabilities either.
Physics of objects and the effects are also solved in a template manner. Enemies die with predetermined animations. Environmental destruction is limited: boxes, barriers, some elements of the environment react to blows, but are not destroyed dynamically. Explosions and elemental effects (fire, water, electricity) are made on pre-prepared animations. Nevertheless, even within such limits, Shift Up achieved expressiveness. For example, when a sword strikes, sparks are thrown off, the trajectory of the attack is dynamically highlighted, and shaking the camera intensifies the blow.
Sound and audio system UE4 is limited compared to middleware solutions like Wwise, but Shift Up has implemented dynamic sound positioning and a volumetric environment module. The music adapts to the phase of the battle: in battle - one layer, upon victory - a transition to a calm melody. Dialogues are recorded with spatial filtering to reflect where the character is - indoors, outdoors, in a tunnel.
Deserves special attention gamepad engine interface. PS5 uses all the DualSense features: adaptive triggers, vibrations, microphone. UE4 does not support this out of the box, so the studio wrote plugins for the Sony platform, embedding them directly into the game build. On PC, a similar effect is supported at the Steam Input and XInput level - although the vibration accuracy is lower.
It is also important to say about level structure. UE4 is not the best engine for seamless open world, so the game is built on a system of "closed arenas" connected by short transitions. Data is loaded in advance using layer streaming - so the transition between zones is fast, with almost no loading screens. In this sense, the engine works in the usual manner of God of War or Bayonetta.
If Shift Up went to UE5, they would probably lose stability, have problems with caching, noise and optimization. Their choice is maturity, not a technology race. And in the case of Stellar Blade - he turned out to be correct.
| QUALITY |
At minimum settings Stellar Blade displays a simplified version of the visual content. Textures lose sharpness, lighting becomes more static, and environmental objects are simplified. The surfaces of metal structures and suits look matte and lose volume. Reflections and post-processing are disabled, and visual effects during battles are minimal. The environment - be it futuristic streets or techno interiors - is presented without dynamics and saturation.
On higher settings Enhanced lighting is activated, materials receive highlights and reflections, and the scene is enriched with shadows and fog. Animations become visually more impressive due to particles, dynamic light and additional layers of detail. Heroes and opponents gain volume and expressiveness, models of equipment and buildings are drawn with high precision. In general, the picture becomes much more cinematic, especially in combination with the fast combat system.
| TEST PART |
Below you will find a table of equipment that was kindly provided by our sponsors: GIGABYTE, ASUS, Kingston и Deep Cool. It reflects the list of motherboards, video cards, memory modules and cooling systems used in the tests, and also indicates the current configuration of the operating system and drivers.
| Test configuration | |
| GIGABYTE | |
| motherboards | |
| ASUS | |
| motherboards | |
| Video Cards |
Asus GeForce RTX 5070 TUF Gaming OC ASUS ROG Strix GeForce RTX 4070 Ti OC |
| KINGSTON | |
| RAM |
16 GB DDR4 4600 CL19 Kingston FURY Renegade 32 GB DDR4 3600 CL16 Kingston FURY Renegade 32 GB DDR4 4000 CL18 Kingston FURY Renegade 32 GB DDR5 5600 CL40 Kingston FURY Beast 32 GB DDR5 6000 CL30 Kingston FURY Renegade 32 GB DDR5 7200 CL36 Kingston FURY Renegade 48GB DDR5 7200 CL36 Kingston FURY Renegade |
| Storage devices |
Kingston FURY Renegade PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD |
| Deep Cool | |
|
Cases and cooling |
|
| Software configuration |
|
| Operating system | Windows 11 24H2 |
| Graphics driver |
Nvidia GeForce/ION Driver Release 576.66 WHQL AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 25.6.1 |
| Monitoring programs | MSI Afterburner 4.6.6 Beta 5 Build 16555 |
All video cards were tested at maximum graphics quality using MSI Afterburner. The purpose of the test is to determine how video cards from different manufacturers behave under the same conditions. Below is a video of a test segment from the game:
Our video cards were tested at different screen sizes 1920x1080, 2560x1440 и 3840x2160 with maximum graphics quality settings without upscales.
| TEST GPU |
In the video card test, the default resolution is 1920x1080, other resolutions are added and removed manually. You can also remove and add any video card positions. You can also select any of our test processors from the list in the drop-down menu, comparing its performance with the given video card tests (the most productive solution is selected by default). The test is carried out on the most productive in this game CPU and scales to other processors, taking into account their testing on NVIDIA and AMD video cards.
- Very high
When resolved 1920x1080:
- Average FPS (25 frames): Reached on video cards of the level of Radeon RX 6700 XT or GeForce RTX 3060.
- Minimum FPS (25 frames): Provided by video cards of the Radeon RX 6700 XT or GeForce RTX 3060 level.
- Comfortable average FPS (60 frames): Possible with video cards of the Radeon RX 6700 XT or GeForce RTX 3060 level.
When resolved 2560x1440:
- Average FPS (25 frames): Reached on video cards of the level of Radeon RX 6700 XT or GeForce RTX 3060.
- Minimum FPS (25 frames): Provided by video cards of the Radeon RX 6700 XT or GeForce RTX 3060 level.
- Comfortable average FPS (60 frames): Possible with video cards of the Radeon RX 6700 XT or GeForce RTX 3060 level.
When resolved 3840x2160:
- Average FPS (25 frames): Reached on video cards of the level of Radeon RX 6700 XT or GeForce RTX 3060.
- Minimum FPS (25 frames): Provided by video cards of the Radeon RX 6700 XT or GeForce RTX 3060 level.
- Comfortable average FPS (60 frames): Possible with graphics cards like Radeon RX 6900 XT or GeForce RTX 4070s.
| VIDEO MEMORY CONSUMPTION |
Testing of the video memory consumed by the game was carried out by the MSI Afterburner program. The results on video cards from AMD and NVIDIA at separate screen resolutions of 1920x1080, 2560x1440 and 3840x2160 with different anti-aliasing settings were taken as an indicator. By default, the most current solutions are displayed in the graph. Other video cards are added and removed from the graph at the reader's request.
- Very high
GameGPU
Resolution 1920x1080:
- Video cards with 12 GB of video memory: consume 6 GB
- Video cards with 16 GB of video memory: consume 6 GB
- Video cards with 24 GB of video memory: consume 7 GB
- Video cards with 32 GB of video memory: consume 7 GB
Resolution 2560x1440:
- Video cards with 12 GB of video memory: consume 6 GB
- Video cards with 16 GB of video memory: consume 7 GB
- Video cards with 24 GB of video memory: consume 7 GB
- Video cards with 32 GB of video memory: consume 7 GB
Resolution 3840x2160:
- Video cards with 12 GB of video memory: consume 8 GB
- Video cards with 16 GB of video memory: consume 9 GB
- Video cards with 24 GB of video memory: consume 9 GB
- Video cards with 32 GB of video memory: consume 9 GB
| TEST CPU |
Testing was carried out at a resolution of 1920x1080. In the processor test, you can remove or add any processor positions. You can also select any tested video card from the list in the drop-down menu, comparing its performance with the given processor test results (by default, the most productive solution from NVIDIA is selected). Testing takes place on the most powerful NVIDIA and AMD video cards and scales to low-end models.
- Very high
When using NVIDIA video cards:
- Processors for acceptable FPS (not lower than 25 frames per second):
- AMD Ryzen 3 3100
- Intel Core i3-10100
- Processors for comfortable FPS (at least 60 frames per second):
- AMD Ryzen 3 3100
- Intel Core i3-10100
When using AMD video cards:
- Processors for acceptable FPS (not lower than 25 frames per second):
- AMD Ryzen 3 3100
- Intel Core i3-10100
- Processors for comfortable FPS (at least 60 frames per second):
- AMD Ryzen 3 3100
- Intel Core i3-10100
- Very high
Loading and using streams:
- Maximum load: The game can load up to 16 streams.
- Optimal loading: Uses up to 12 threads as efficiently as possible.
| RAM TEST |
The indicator was taken as all used RAM. The RAM test on the all system was conducted on various video cards without launching third-party applications (browsers, etc.). In the graphics, you can add and remove any resolutions and video cards as desired.
- Very high
GameGPU
Resolution 1920x1080:
- Video cards with 12 GB of video memory: consume 15 GB of RAM
- Video cards with 16 GB of video memory: consume 17 GB of RAM
- Video cards with 24 GB of video memory: consume 16 GB of RAM
- Video cards with 32 GB of video memory: consume 16 GB of RAM
Resolution 2560x1440:
- Video cards with 12 GB of video memory: consume 15 GB of RAM
- Video cards with 16 GB of video memory: consume 18 GB of RAM
- Video cards with 24 GB of video memory: consume 16 GB of RAM
- Video cards with 32 GB of video memory: consume 16 GB of RAM
Resolution 3840x2160:
- Video cards with 12 GB of video memory: consume 15 GB of RAM
- Video cards with 16 GB of video memory: consume 18 GB of RAM
- Video cards with 24 GB of video memory: consume 16 GB of RAM
- Video cards with 32 GB of video memory: consume 16 GB of RAM
| SPONSORS TESTS |
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