Samson Benchmarks & PC Performance Analysis

Last month, Liquid Swords released its story-driven third-person action adventure, Samson, on PC. Now, I know this PC Performance Analysis is a bit late. But hey, better late than never. So, time now to benchmark this UE5 indie title and see how it performs 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 596.21, and the Radeon Adrenalin Edition 26.3.1 drivers.

Liquid Swords has added a few graphics settings to tweak. PC gamers can adjust the quality of Textures, Reflections, Shadows, Global Illumination, and more. There is also support for NVIDIA DLSS 4 and AMD FSR 3.1. However, there is no support for Intel XeSS 2.0.

Samson does not feature a built-in benchmark tool. So, for our benchmarks, I used this scene. This appeared to be one of the most demanding areas I could find early in the game.

Samson is a GPU-bound title. Even at 1080p/Low Settings, our NVIDIA RTX 5090 was used to its fullest. As such, it was a bit meaningless to test different CPU configurations. In this title, most of you will be limited by your GPU and not by your CPU.

Our top five GPUs were able to run the game with over 60FPS at all times at 1080p/Ultra. The AMD Radeon RX 7900XTX came close to the performance of the NVIDIA RTX 5080, and it was a bit faster than the AMD Radeon RX 9070XT. The AMD Radeon RX 6900XT was also a bit faster than the NVIDIA RTX 3080.

Only three of our GPUs were able to offer a constant 60FPS experience at 1440p/Ultra. These GPUs were the NVIDIA RTX 4090, RTX 5080, and RTX 5090. The AMD Radeon RX 7900XTX and RX 9070XT can provide a smooth gaming experience, provided you use a FreeSync monitor. As for Native 4K/Ultra, the NVIDIA RTX 5090 is able to push 60FPS, even during driving.

Scalability through the in-game graphics settings doesn’t seem particularly strong. Dropping to Quality settings resulted in only a 14% performance boost. Switching to Balanced provided another 14% increase, and finally, using Performance settings added just 12% more.

Graphics-wise, Samson looks great for an indie game. The game uses Lumen, and as such, we get great lighting. There is also support for Nanite. But compared to some other UE5 games, I did notice a few pop-ins. Despite that, Samson looks more consistent with fewer pop-ins than most other non-UE5 games.

The biggest graphical feature of Samson is its environments. Most of them look great. Sadly, the main character (and almost all secondary characters) do not look that great. Animations can also feel a bit stiff. As I said, this is a double-A indie game. Therefore, you should temper your expectations.

Samson supports NVIDIA’s Ray Reconstruction, even though it does not include Path Tracing. However, Ray Reconstruction currently suffers from major shimmering issues when the camera is in motion. While the image may look fine when standing still, you’ll notice significant shimmering across many surfaces once you start moving. Because of this, I recommend avoiding Ray Reconstruction, even if you have a high-end NVIDIA GPU. The game also supports DLSS 4 Multi-Frame Generation. From what I’ve observed, visual artifacts are minimal. So, if you can maintain a solid base framerate (around 50FPS) without DLSS 4 MFG, enabling it will provide a substantial performance smoothness.

All in all, Samson runs like most Unreal Engine 5 games. Liquid Swords is a small team, so you should not expect any optimization miracles from it. This isn’t the most optimized UE5 game. At the same time, it’s not the worst-performing UE5 game we’ve seen to date. It’s somewhere in the middle. I also did not experience any major stuttering issues in its latest version. The game did suffer from numerous stutters when it launched. However, the devs have resolved most of them.

Enjoy!

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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