The Blood of Dawnwalker PC Performance Analysis

Earlier this month, Bandai Namco released The Blood of Dawnwalker. Powered by Unreal Engine 5, it’s time to benchmark this new action RPG 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, as well as the GeForce 616.92 and the Radeon Adrenalin Edition 26.9.1 drivers.

Rebel Wolves has added a few graphics settings to tweak. PC gamers can adjust the quality of Shadows, Lighting, Textures, Shading, Foliage, and more. The game also supports Intel XeSS, AMD FSR, and NVIDIA DLSS. However, there is only support for AMD FSR Frame Gen and NVIDIA DLSS Frame Gen. Furthermore, there is no support for DLSS Multi-Frame Gen.

The Blood of Dawnwalker does not have a built-in benchmark tool. So, for our benchmarks, I used the first village. This appears to be one of the most demanding areas you can find early in the game.

The Blood of Dawnwalker is a GPU-heavy title. At 1080p, our NVIDIA RTX 5090 was used to its fullest. So, chances are you will be bottlenecked by your GPU, and not by your CPU.

At 1080p/Ultra, the game could run at over 60 FPS on our top three GPUs. These were the NVIDIA RTX 4090, RTX 5080, and RTX 5090. The AMD Radeon RX 9070XT and RX 7900XTX can also provide a smooth gaming experience, provided you use a FreeSync monitor.

At 1440p/Ultra, only the NVIDIA RTX 4090 and the RTX 5090 can run the game smoothly. As for Native 4K/Ultra, there is no GPU that can come close to a 60 FPS experience.

The good news is that the game’s High settings are more reasonable. By using them, we were able to hit 60 FPS at Native 4K on our NVIDIA RTX 5090. So, I highly recommend avoiding the Ultra Settings. Instead, you can use a mix of High and Ultra. Then, you can use an upscaler, and once you have a healthy base frame rate, you can use Frame Gen.

Graphics-wise, I was not impressed by what this new UE5 game has to offer. Although it uses Lumen, it can look a bit flat and bland at times. Ironically, this may be a game that can greatly benefit from DLSS 5. So, expect another article in which we’ll use a DLSS 5 Mod to overhaul its dated visuals.

I should also note that the devs have not fixed the camera stutters I’ve reported. Alongside those stutters, the game also has traversal stutters. So, unless you slowly move the camera, your overall experience will be worse than what you have in Oblivion Remastered.

Overall, I was not impressed by The Blood of Dawnwalker. And before you start screaming, I’m talking about its tech, not its gameplay. This is a PC Performance Analysis, not a game review. The game suffers from many stutters. Its high GPU demands also do not match the visuals on screen. Thankfully, you can lower the settings to improve performance. So, it’s good to see that the game can scale well through its graphics settings. Still, Rebel Wolves has a lot of post-launch optimization work to do. Because right now, it is a technical mess!

John Papadopoulos

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.”
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