I’ve been playing a lot of The Blood of Dawnwalker over the last week or so, and while the game does successfully stress out my gaming PC, I’ve been surprised at just how stable it is.
Just like with Star Wars Zero Company and Halo: Campaign Evolved, The Blood of Dawnwalker runs on Unreal Engine 5, and has been shockingly free of technical problems. The game doesn’t have the same issues with crashing and stuttering that Zero Company has, and scales down a lot better than Halo: Campaign Evolved does, although I would still avoid running it on something like a handheld gaming PC.
I’ve been primarily playing The Blood of Dawnwalker on an admittedly powerful system with an AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D, 32GB of RAM and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 – well above its recommended specs. And the game pushes even this system, only delivering around 70–80 fps most of the time at 4K with the Ultra preset and DLSS set to Quality.
While I’d love the frame rate to be even higher, the problem I’ve had with a lot of Unreal 5 games is the constant stuttering. I still haven’t finished the Silent Hill 2 or Metal Gear Solid 3 remakes that came out last year, even though I love those games, primarily because they can become a stuttery mess at times, especially when loading into a new scene. The Blood of Dawnwalker, however, has remained stable at all times.
It’s not limited to my main PC, either. I have the Steam Machine set up on my TV, and while I do have to lower the PC settings dramatically, I can get 55–60 fps at 1440p with mostly medium settings and the game looks just fine. And even on the Steam Machine, which has a much weaker CPU and less memory, I still don’t get the kind of stuttering and crashes that Unreal 5 has become known for on weaker hardware.
I’ve even had a chance to play the game a bit on the PS5 and Xbox Series X, and The Blood of Dawnwalker runs like a dream on those consoles too. The visuals do scale down quite a bit on those consoles, but it feels good to play. I haven’t had the chance to grab capture to run through a frame rate analysis tool, but the game feels like its running at around 60 fps on the PS5 Pro, and at least 40-50 on the Xbox Series X, with the Performance profile and the Balanced profile, respectively.
But while the game does run smoothly on the consoles, Dawnwalker is one of the few Unreal games where I’d recommend anyone with a decent rig to play it on PC instead. It’s a beautiful game, especially once you get out into the wilderness, and the console versions lose quite a bit of detail and foliage density.
This is the type of game where I’d expect a bit of jankiness, too. I’ve played a ton of niche RPGs that run like garbage, like the Gothic Remake, but I stick to regardless because of their depth. Thankfully, the Blood of Dawnwalker avoids that entirely, despite running on probably the most annoying game engine on the market right now, and that’s incredible.
Jackie Thomas is the Senior Tech Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra
