Dune: Awakening - PC performance graphics benchmarks of Graphics Cards and Processors
We have tested Dune: Awakening 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 |
MMO Survival Dune: Awakening created on the basis of Unreal Engine 5 and offers realistic visualization of sandstorms, massive open spaces and dynamic events. The game is designed for long-term stay in the online world with a high density of players and constant generation of objects, so it has strict requirements for the processor, memory and SSD. The visual component is based on DirectX 12 support, a progressive lighting system and a large-scale drawing distance. The game does not support HDD and requires a mandatory network connection.
Minimum system requirements:
Operating system: Windows 10 64-bit (or newer)
Processor: Intel Core i5-7400 / AMD Ryzen 3 1200
Memory: 16 GB
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 (6GB) / AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT (6GB)
DirectX: Version 12
Network connection: Broadband Internet
Data storage: 60 GB SSD
Additional: The game does not start from HDD. Minimum parameters allow playing on low settings at 30 FPS in Full HD.
Recommended system requirements:
Operating system: Windows 10 64-bit (or newer)
Processor: Intel Core i7-10700K / AMD Ryzen 5 2600X
Memory: 16 GB
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 (8GB) / AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT (12GB)
DirectX: Version 12
Network connection: Broadband Internet
Data storage: 75 GB SSD
Additional: A stable connection and installation on NVMe is recommended. Playing on high settings at 60 FPS requires a video card with 8-12 GB of video memory.
| DEVELOPMENT HISTORY |
Dune: Awakening was the result of an ambitious idea - to combine the atmosphere of science fiction and role-playing depth with the scale of an MMO sandbox in an open world. The project was originally conceived as an attempt to go beyond the traditional idea of multiplayer survival games. The rejection of a template approach determined the entire development cycle. Instead of following the canon and recreating familiar episodes, the path was chosen to create an alternative branch of events. This opened up space for a new mythology in which players can not only exist in the world of Arrakis, but also shape it.
The first prototypes were based on minimal mechanics of movement through the sands and interaction with resources. However, it quickly became clear that the implementation of such a large-scale environment required a completely different technical approach. The basis was procedural generation of landscapes in real time with the preservation of key points necessary for quests and balance. The team switched to a modular structure of the world to ensure flexibility. At the same time, work began on the simulation of sandstorms, weather fronts and the reaction of fauna to the player's actions.
Arrakis was meant to be more than just a backdrop, but a full-fledged participant in the gameplay. To this end, the developers created a dynamic "eco-tension" system - the more actively a player or their group influences the environment, the more the world responds: the frequency of storms increases, predators become more active, resources mutate. This creates a chain of consequences that change the balance in a particular zone.
The project was conceived as cross-platform from day one. This meant constant optimization even at the alpha build stage. The rejection of cutscenes and constant synchronization allowed the implementation of a client-side event model, which reduced the load on the servers. However, transferring the state of the world between sessions required the implementation of a decentralized logical cache system capable of processing tens of thousands of changes in the landscape and inventory.
As the project developed, the focus shifted from survival as a genre to strategic control over zones. A system of "dynamic holdings" was created: players could create outposts, fortify them, and interact with others through trade or espionage. Each base is not simply built, but leaves a mark on the world, forming nodes of influence. This allowed the foundation to be laid for future events in the style of large-scale sieges and political conflicts.
An important task was to integrate the unique resources of Arrakis into the gameplay. Spice, the central element of the world, received dozens of ways to extract, process and protect. Some zones at certain times became key for collection, provoking a struggle between players. As a result, a dynamic model of conflict arose: escalation zones are not scripted, but formed by the balance system.
In 2023–2024, the project underwent many changes in the AI logic. It was decided to move from basic guards and creatures to a behavior system based on a perception model. NPCs analyze smell, noise, movement, and do not simply react to hits. This made enemy behavior less predictable and strengthened survival as a mechanical challenge.
The complete abandonment of the mini-map, quest markers and navigation was an important step. Instead, there is a navigation system based on geotags, voice descriptions, the position of the sun and terrain. This makes traveling through the desert not just background, but intense, especially at night or in conditions of poor visibility. The final months before the release were devoted to stabilizing the network part, checking the integrity of the world and fine-tuning the balance. Instead of a traditional story-driven walkthrough, players get the opportunity to become part of the ecosystem and influence what Arrakis will be like in a week, a month, a year.
| GRAPHICS |
The visual style of Dune: Awakening is an attempt to convey not only the scale of the planet, but also its alien, hostile nature. Arrakis is not romanticized in the game - it is aggressive, dangerous and indifferent to human survival. The graphics are built on the contrast of large-scale deserts with detailed short-term perspective. Technologies used Unreal Engine 5, including Nanite and Lumen, made it possible to implement a visual core that combines cinematic expression and gameplay functionality.
Each biome differs not only in textures, but also in geometric structure. Dunes are constantly reformatted by the wind, which is achieved through a combination of procedural geometry and a dynamic landscape shader. Mountains, caves, salt marshes, ancient ruins - all this creates a rich visual canvas on which the player constantly reads information: the direction of the sand, the color of the plants, the reflection of light - everything serves as navigation.
The game's color palette is built on complex lighting filters. Morning Arrakis with soft shadows and cold light is in stark contrast to midday hell with scorched shadows and an eye-searing white glow. The Lumen system used ensures realistic light behavior: shadowing in canyons, scattered rays in sand clouds, highlights on metal surfaces, and natural reflections.
The game's animations are synchronized with the visual layer. Sand particles, footstep dust, plant sway — everything reacts to physics and wind direction. Characters leave footprints, and the density of the sand affects the speed of movement. Interaction with the world is not just a visual effect, but a way to emphasize the dynamics of the environment.
Particular attention is paid to living elements. The fauna of Arrakis - from small insects to giant worms - is rendered with photorealistic accuracy. All creatures have their own behavior structure, and their visual presentation is subject to biological and thermodynamic laws: skin color depends on the zone, body temperature - on the time of day.
There are no cut scenes as such in the game - instead, real-time animation is used based on MetaHuman and modular rig systems. The camera reacts to the player's gaze and events happening nearby. The characters' emotions are expressed by facial expressions, poses and direction of gaze. This makes each dialogue visually unique.
The visual style constantly changes depending on the time, place, status and state of the player. The same area of the world can appear safe in the morning and deadly at night due to changes in lighting, temperature and the activity of local life forms. The effects of heat, air deformation and shimmering sand are achieved through a combination of post-processing and unconventional use of depth shaders.
| GAME ENGINE |
The game is created on Unreal Engine 5, and this is not just a choice for the sake of graphics. The engine is used at a deep level - as a tool for building, optimizing, and also for the constant evolution of the world. Key components used are: Nanite, Lumen, World Partition, Chaos Physics, Control Rig, MetaHuman, Niagara, Virtual Shadow Maps, and more. Each of these systems is used not for show, but in the context of Arrakis's tasks as a living, evolving world.
Nanite provides virtualized geometry: each stone, each building is a full mesh with tens of millions of polygons, optimized on the fly. This eliminates LODs and pop-ins of objects. The player can come close to the ruins of an ancient civilization and examine the patterns without losing detail. This is especially important when traveling through the desert, where the only landmarks may be geological anomalies.
Lumen is used to calculate global illumination, reflections and shadows. It allows you to instantly change the atmosphere - a storm that eclipses the sun creates a blue filter, light gathers dust in the air, and glare from an enemy's shield is distorted in a sandy haze. A change in time of day or the onset of a storm instantly affects the picture without reloading the scene.
World Partition replaces the traditional division into levels. The entire Arrakis map is divided into a virtual grid, loaded asynchronously. This allows for large-scale battles, player migrations, and fleet movements without delays. The player can go from one end of the map to the other - without loading, without screens, without borders.
Chaos Physics provides a physical model of destruction, object behavior, and ballistics. Sand is physically active. It shifts under the pressure of equipment, flows, settles, reacts to impacts and fire. Transport loses traction on slopes, shells form craters, buildings crumble piece by piece. All this is calculated in real time.
Control Rig and IK allow character animations to adapt to the surface. The character does not walk "on a plane", but on the curved surface of the dune. Legs are adjusted, hands react to touch. MetaHuman is used not only for dialogues, but also for visualizing pain, fatigue, fear. This is visible in the face, in the voice, in the pose.
All gameplay logic is written in Blueprints with low-level optimization. This allows for quick implementation of new features without rebuilding the entire project. For example, sandstorm events are a set of calls that can be debugged in isolation and applied to any zone of the world. Finally, Niagara is used - a particle system: sand, smoke, spice, blood, sparks, precipitation. Each particle has physics and interacts with lighting. For example, smoke reflects light from spice, and dust scatters laser beams. Particles are involved in tactics: they can be used as cover, distraction or a means of signaling.
| QUALITY |
At minimum settings Dune: Awakening Disables advanced visual effects such as background texture detail, soft shadows, and atmospheric distortion. Visibility of objects is limited, sandstorms look flat, and scene lighting remains static. Anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering are reduced to the basic level. Performance in this mode is maintained at 30 FPS, but the environment loses depth.
At maximum settings, the game uses full-screen global illumination, increased object draw distance, improved dust and particle effects, dynamic lighting and shadow masks. Character and vehicle models are detailed, the environment demonstrates realistic evolution of time of day and weather.
Dune: Awakening is built as a technically intensive project with a bias towards online and procedural generation. A comfortable gaming experience is provided with a modern system, although support for more accessible configurations is provided at the expense of reducing the quality of visual effects.
| 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 positions of video cards. 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 (by default, the most productive solution is selected). The test is carried out on the most powerful CPU in this game and is scaled to other processors, taking into account their testing on NVIDIA and AMD video cards.
- Max
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 2080 Ti level.
- Comfortable average FPS (60 frames): Possible with video cards of the Radeon RX 9060 or GeForce RTX 3080 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 2080 Ti level.
- Comfortable average FPS (60 frames): Possible with video cards of the Radeon RX 9070 or GeForce RTX 5070 Ti level.
When resolved 3840x2160:
- Average FPS (25 frames): Reached on video cards of the level of Radeon RX 6800 XT or GeForce RTX 3080.
- Minimum FPS (25 frames): Provided by video cards of the Radeon RX 7900 or GeForce RTX 5070 level.
- Comfortable average FPS (60 frames): Possible with video cards of the GeForce RTX 5090 level.
| 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.
- Max
GameGPU
Resolution 1920x1080:
- 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 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 7 GB
- Video cards with 16 GB of video memory: consume 8 GB
- Video cards with 24 GB of video memory: consume 8 GB
- Video cards with 32 GB of video memory: consume 8 GB
| CPU TEST |
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.
- Max
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 3600
- 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 5 3600
- Intel Core i3-10100
- Max
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.
- Max
GameGPU
Resolution 1920x1080:
- Video cards with 12 GB of video memory: consume 22 GB of RAM
- Video cards with 16 GB of video memory: consume 22 GB of RAM
- Video cards with 24 GB of video memory: consume 12 GB of RAM
- Video cards with 32 GB of video memory: consume 12 GB of RAM
Resolution 2560x1440:
- Video cards with 12 GB of video memory: consume 22 GB of RAM
- Video cards with 16 GB of video memory: consume 22 GB of RAM
- Video cards with 24 GB of video memory: consume 22 GB of RAM
- Video cards with 32 GB of video memory: consume 22 GB of RAM
Resolution 3840x2160:
- Video cards with 12 GB of video memory: consume 22 GB of RAM
- Video cards with 16 GB of video memory: consume 22 GB of RAM
- Video cards with 24 GB of video memory: consume 22 GB of RAM
- Video cards with 32 GB of video memory: consume 22 GB of RAM
| SPONSORS TESTS |
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