Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon - PC performance graphics benchmarks of Graphics Cards and Processors
We have tested the released Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon 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 |
Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon is built on the Unity engine and uses DirectX 11, which imposes restrictions on visual technologies, but at the same time allows for flexible scaling of graphics for different PC configurations.
System Requirements
The minimum
• OS: Windows 10 (64 bit)
• Processor: Intel Core i5 8th generation or AMD equivalent
• RAM: 12 GB
• Video card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6 GB or AMD equivalent
• DirectX: 11
• Storage: 31GB (SSD highly recommended)
• Settings: low
Recommended
• OS: Windows 10/11 (64-bit)
• Processor: 7th generation Intel Core i13
• RAM: 16 GB
• Video card: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Super
• DirectX: 11
• Storage: 31GB (SSD highly recommended)
• Settings: ultra
| DEVELOPMENT HISTORY |
The creation of Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon began with the idea of rebuilding a classic fantasy structure based on a dark, hopeless mythology. Contrary to the usual heroic narrative, the dark, twisted atmosphere of a fallen Avalon, torn between madness, plague, and the remnants of humanity, dominates from the very beginning. The developers focused on a complete reboot of the world, where every faction, belief system, and even magic are subordinated to a new idea of the death of hope. Because of this, the tone of the script is shifted towards personal dramas, painful choices, and the destruction of morality - and all this is realized without the pathos and theatrics typical of RPGs.
In early versions, the game suffered from technical instability: the interface froze when switching between quests, the combat logic failed when facing more than two opponents, and scene loading caused lags even on powerful systems. Early builds were criticized for an unclear quest structure and poor map readability. These problems were gradually eliminated, in parallel with the expansion of content. After a large-scale update in the spring of 2024, many quest lines were reworked, navigation was improved, and dead ends in the plots were removed. This allowed the project to take a step from a tech demo to a full-fledged RPG.
The gameplay has been based on the concept of factional conflict from the start, but without an explicit division into "good" and "evil." Instead, the player is immersed in a society consumed by degradation: in some regions, military theocrats have seized power, in others, marauders and dictators use magic to subjugate the survivors. The choices the player makes formally provide alternatives, but in reality, they are only options for the lesser evil. This underscores the overall tone of the game: there are no winners, no final decisions, everything is subject to the cycle of decay. Developing these scenarios required abandoning linear branches and introducing a complex system of consequences that affect quests, loot, the structure of the world, and access to new areas.
The game's plot is built around the idea of the fall of mythical hope - the Grail, which became the cause of the curse. Mythological images are transformed: King Arthur is a tyrannical cult symbol, knights are half-mad adventurers, and Avalon itself is a place where myth and nightmare merged into a single chaos. As the project developed, the main focus of the script was transferred from global rescues to personal stories: mutilated bodies, memory, betrayal, moral fatigue. This led to a noticeable shift in the structure of dialogues - instead of excessive exposition in the final version, they became short, abrupt, with a minimalism that emphasizes the general devastation of the world.
| GRAPHICS |
The visual implementation of Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon is deliberately stylized as a decaying, restrained world, where bright colors are almost completely absent, and the lighting and shapes of structures are inspired by the image of a crumbling civilization. The main emphasis is on the details of the environment: cracks in the stones, thickets of moss, traces of dried blood, deathly pale fog. The picture deliberately avoids glossy surfaces - there is no cinematic polish here. Instead, the game gives a feeling of gloomy dusty matter, as if each element of the environment physically penetrates the player's consciousness.
A significant portion of the locations are hand-built, and this is evident in the asymmetrical shapes, non-linear roads, and the constant presence of elements of desolation — fallen walls, rotting trees, half-crumbling monuments. The lighting is based on local sources: torches, the moon, dying fires. This creates deep shadows and a complex color temperature — warm is distorted, cold is enhanced. In some areas, variable lighting is implemented, where the light changes depending on the density of fog or magical fields. This approach often disrupts the player's comfort, but makes the picture organically aggressive.
Character and enemy models are deliberately deformed. Normal proportions are rare, NPC faces are deliberately ornate or disfigured, which serves as a visual metaphor for moral decay. Armor, clothing, and weapons are presented as remnants of a lost era - rusty blades, chain mail with scars, rags instead of suits. At the same time, the game does not have unnecessary visual noise: the HUD is minimal, the interface is simple, pop-up information is limited. This design emphasizes the focus on the environment, not the mechanics.
The animations don't pretend to be cinematic - they are a bit stiff, especially in close combat, but they fit the overall style. There is little smoothness in the transitions between actions, which sometimes interferes with reading combat situations, but increases the tension. The visual effects of magic are modeled after decay - spells do not sparkle, but distort the space, as if the world is shrinking in on itself. This creates a specific aesthetic - magic as decay, not power. Together with the low, guttural sound design, this visually supports the overall feeling of degradation and pain.
| GAME ENGINE |
The game base is built on an upgraded version of Unity, which immediately imposed a number of limitations and advantages. On the one hand, the engine allows you to create an open world with relatively low system resource requirements. On the other hand, the Unity architecture initially does not cope well with large zones, which is why early builds had long loading times, physics bugs, and geometry failures. At the time of release, a proprietary zonal generation system was implemented, which minimizes loading when switching between sectors, avoiding black screens and discontinuous transitions.
The key feature of the engine was the introduction of support DirectX 12, which gave the game access to new shaders and optimized work with video memory. This is especially important in scenes with dense lighting and many objects - for example, in a fight with several enemies and active magic effects. Scaling support is implemented through FSR 2.2, and in the latest patches, Frame Generation, which allows you to maintain a stable 60 FPS even in intense scenes at high settings. At the same time, the engine does not use ray tracing - all lighting and shadow effects are built on layered masks and baked maps.
The physical model of close combat and interaction with the environment is implemented on its own module, working separately from the main Unity Physics engine. This allowed us to implement a rough but tangible mechanics of strikes: each collision of a weapon with an enemy's body is responded to by animation, slowdown and a slight rollback of the model. However, the system is not perfect - collision bugs can occur in narrow spaces, and control over blocks is not always responsive. Artificial intelligence uses simple behavior trees, sometimes too straightforward: enemies rarely dodge or act unconventionally, but they quickly react to noise, lighting and magical signals.
Optimization in the latest versions has become noticeably better. The game is capable of running on mid-range video cards (for example, RTX 2060 or RX 6600) at 1080p with high settings and FSR enabled. The menu offers full quality presets, frame limits, vertical sync, as well as manual adjustment of all graphic parameters - from shadows and fog density to the display distance of objects. This makes the engine flexible, despite the limitations of the platform itself.
| QUALITY |
On the low quality The game looks simplified: low-resolution textures, basic lighting without soft shadows and global illumination, and almost no post-processing effects. The landscape and architecture lose depth, the models become angular, and the water and atmosphere look flat. The visual style is preserved, but the detail of the world suffers greatly.
RџSЂRё maximum settings The game reveals the potential of Unity: sharper textures, local light sources from torches and magic, richer color gradients, and a light haze in the background are used. Character and object models become richer, metal and stone materials are improved, reflections on water and shadows from vegetation appear. Although this is not the level of modern AAA-projects, the overall visual integrity of the world is significantly improved.
| 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 576.52 WHQL AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 25.5.1 |
| 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.
- Ultra
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 2080 Ti 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 7700 XT or GeForce RTX 4070 level.
When resolved 3840x2160:
- Average FPS (25 frames): Achieved on Radeon RX 6800 or GeForce RTX 4060 Ti level graphics cards.
- Minimum FPS (25 frames): Provided by video cards of the Radeon RX 6800 or GeForce RTX 4070 level.
- Comfortable average FPS (60 frames): Possible with Radeon-level video cards RX 7900 XTX or GeForce RTX 4090.
| 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.
- Ultra
GameGPU
Resolution 1920x1080:
- Video cards with 12 GB of video memory: consume 3 GB
- Video cards with 16 GB of video memory: consume 3 GB
- Video cards with 24 GB of video memory: consume 3 GB
- Video cards with 32 GB of video memory: consume 3 GB
Resolution 2560x1440:
- Video cards with 12 GB of video memory: consume 3 GB
- Video cards with 16 GB of video memory: consume 3 GB
- Video cards with 24 GB of video memory: consume 3 GB
- Video cards with 32 GB of video memory: consume 3 GB
Resolution 3840x2160:
- Video cards with 12 GB of video memory: consume 5 GB
- Video cards with 16 GB of video memory: consume 5 GB
- Video cards with 24 GB of video memory: consume 5 GB
- Video cards with 32 GB of video memory: consume 5 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.
- Ultra
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
- Ultra
Loading and using streams:
- Maximum load: The game can load up to 12 streams.
- Optimal loading: Uses up to 8 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.
- Ultra
GameGPU
Resolution 1920x1080:
- Video cards with 12 GB of video memory: consume 9 GB of RAM
- Video cards with 16 GB of video memory: consume 7 GB of RAM
- Video cards with 24 GB of video memory: consume 8 GB of RAM
- Video cards with 32 GB of video memory: consume 9 GB of RAM
Resolution 2560x1440:
- Video cards with 12 GB of video memory: consume 11 GB of RAM
- Video cards with 16 GB of video memory: consume 7 GB of RAM
- Video cards with 24 GB of video memory: consume 8 GB of RAM
- Video cards with 32 GB of video memory: consume 9 GB of RAM
Resolution 3840x2160:
- Video cards with 12 GB of video memory: consume 11 GB of RAM
- Video cards with 16 GB of video memory: consume 7 GB of RAM
- Video cards with 24 GB of video memory: consume 8 GB of RAM
- Video cards with 32 GB of video memory: consume 9 GB of RAM
| SPONSORS TESTS |
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