505 Games has lifted the review embargo for Blades of Fire. Powered by Mercury Engine 6, it’s time to benchmark it and examine its performance on PC.
For our benchmarks, we 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. We also used Windows 10 64-bit, the GeForce 576.40, and the Radeon Adrenalin Edition 25.5.1 drivers.
MercurySteam has added a few graphics settings to tweak. PC gamers can adjust the quality of Objects, Shadows, Textures, Volumetric and more. Interestingly enough, the game forces an upscaling setting to everyone. Right now, there is no setting for TAA. As such, you are forced to use AMD FSR 3.0, NVIDIA DLSS 4 or Intel XeSS. Not only that, but there is an FPS target setting that you cannot disable. Oh, and you cannot navigate the settings with the mouse. This screams to me like a bare-bones console port. Hell, even the settings are listed as Quality, Balanced, and Performance.
Blades of Fire does not feature a built-in benchmark tool. So, for our tests, we used this area. This appeared to be one of the most demanding we could find early in the game. It also exposes some awful CPU bottleneck issues that we’ll discuss. Since the game does not have a TAA/Native setting, we’ve used AMD FSR 3.0 at 100% on all of our GPUs.
At 1080p/Quality Settings, all of our GPUs were able to provide a smooth gaming experience except of one. Right now, the game performs HORRIBLY on the AMD Radeon RX 9070XT. To put things into perspective, the AMD Radeon RX 7900XTX is 128% faster than the RX 9070XT. And that’s not all. The AMD Radeon RX 6900XT is 88% faster than the RX 9070XT. This is most likely a driver issue that AMD will have to fix.
To prove my claims, here are two screenshots from the exact same location. The first one is with the AMD Radeon RX 9070XT and the second is with the AMD Radeon RX 7900XTX.
As you may have also noticed, the NVIDIA RTX 4090, RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 have been severely limited by the CPU or the RAM. I’m not sure what’s going on as none of our CPU cores is maxed out. So, this could either be a driver or a RAM issue.
Now I’d like you to take a look at the benchmark scene. This area does not, in any way, justify this kind of performance. This is, obviously, a major optimization issue that the devs will have to fix.
What’s also interesting here is the performance on the AMD Radeon RX 7900XTX. This AMD GPU is 38% faster in terms of minimum framerates than the aforementioned NVIDIA GPUs.
At 1440p/Quality Settings, you’ll need at least an NVIDIA RTX 3080. Again, the AMD Radeon RX 9070XT is unable to offer a smooth gaming experience. Also, once again, our NVIDIA RTX 4090, RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 are bottlenecked.
At 4K/Quality Settings, we finally get some proper GPU results. Our top three GPUs are able to provide a constant 60FPS experience. Moreover, the AMD Radeon RX 6900XT manages to compete with the AMD Radeon RX 9070XT. So, if you own an AMD Radeon RX 9000 series GPU, I suggest staying away from this game until AMD and MercurySteam fix these performance issues.
Graphics-wise, I was not that impressed with Blades of Fire. The game has small environments, and its lighting feels so old-gen-ish. To its credit, MercurySteam used numerous high-quality textures. However, this game cannot compete with other double-A games like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Still Wakes The Deep or Nobody Wants to Die.
To its credit, the game does not appear to suffer from any traversal or shader compilation stutters. However, there are some framepacing issue that can occur when you’re moving the camera really fast. Take a look at the frametime graph in the following screenshot. It looks awful, right? Again, this issue occurs ONLY if you are constantly spinning or moving the camera quickly. Still, it’s something you should be aware of.
In all honesty, Blades of Fire feels like a bare-bones console port. It does not, in any way, feel like a PC game. The devs have forced an upscaling setting to everyone, the graphics settings are listed as those of consoles, and you cannot navigate the menu with the mouse. The game also suffers from major optimization issues. Yes, you can brute-force your way as the game is not that demanding. However, this does not make it a great PC game. Plus, it currently performs horribly on the AMD Radeon RX 9000 series GPUs.
The good news here is that Blades of Fire can run smoothly on a wide range of GPUs. And that’s perhaps its saving grace. So, if you only care about performance, you will be fine with it. It’s also not a bad-looking game. Just make sure to temper your expectations as it won’t also impress you with its graphics. Generally speaking, though, as a PC game, it feels lackluster. So, let’s hope that the devs will fix some of the issues we mentioned above!
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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