Last month, NACON released Styx: Blades of Greed on PC. Powered by Unreal Engine 5, it’s time now to benchmark it and examine its performance on PC.
For our benchmarks, I used an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 32GB of DDR5 at 6000Mhz, AMD’s Radeon RX 6900XT, RX 7900XTX, RX 9070XT, as well as NVIDIA’s RTX 2080Ti, RTX 3080, RTX 4090, RTX 5080, and RTX 5090. I also used Windows 10 64-bit, the GeForce 591.86, and the Radeon Adrenalin Edition 26.2.1 drivers.
Cyanide has added a few graphics settings to tweak. PC gamers can adjust the quality of View Distance, Textures, Reflections, Shadows, and more. There is also support for NVIDIA DLSS 4 with Multi-Frame Gen, and AMD FSR 3.0. However, there is no support for Intel XeSS 2.0.
Styx: Blades of Greed does not have a built-in benchmark tool. So, for our tests, I used this area. From what I could see, this was one of the most taxing areas I could find early in the game. So, it should give us a pretty good idea of how the rest of it runs.
At 1080p/Max Settings, the AMD Radeon RX 6900XT was faster than the NVIDIA RTX 3080, and it was able to provide a smooth gaming experience, provided you use a FreeSync monitor. Our top five GPUs had no trouble at all running the game with over 60FPS at all times.
Interestingly enough, the AMD Radeon RX 7900XTX and the RX 9070XT were able to match the performance of the NVIDIA RTX 5080. The AMD GPUs punch above their weight in this particular title.
At 1440p/Max Settings, our top five GPUs were able to offer framerates over 60FPS at all times. As for Native 4K/Max Settings, the NVIDIA RTX 5090 was able to offer a smooth gaming experience. There were some drops to 57FPS but if you own a G-Sync monitor, most of you won’t really notice them.
Graphics-wise, Styx: Blades of Greed looks great. This is another case in which Lumen can make an indie game punch above its weight. This new Styx game looks a full generation ahead of the previous entries. This is the reason Cyanide chose to use Unreal Engine 5. And, from a visual standpoint, they did the right thing.
Before closing, I should note that the game does not suffer from any shader compilation stutters. I did get some traversal stutters, however, they were not that annoying. Most of you won’t even notice them. So, Styx: Blades of Greed runs better than your average UE5 game.
All in all, Styx: Blades of Greed runs better than your average Unreal Engine 5 game. To be crystal clear, this isn’t the most optimized UE5 title. At the same time, it’s nowhere close to the worst-performing UE5 games. It’s above average. And, since we’re talking about a small studio like Cyanide, this is actually a solid product. It could have been better, but hey, it could have also been far, far worse!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
Contact: Email