Final week, Bandai Namco launched Ace Fight 8: Wings of Theve on PC. Powered by Unreal Engine 5.4.0, it’s time to benchmark it and look at its efficiency 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, in addition to NVIDIA’s RTX 2080Ti, RTX 3080, RTX 4090, RTX 5080, and RTX 5090. I additionally used Home windows 10 64-bit, in addition to the GeForce 617.14 and the Radeon Adrenalin Version 26.9.2 drivers.
Bandai Namco has added a number of graphics settings to tweak. PC players can alter the standard of Fashions, Clouds, Textures, Shadows, and extra. There’s additionally assist for NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR. Nonetheless, the sport doesn’t assist Body Gen for both of them. There’s additionally no assist for Intel XeSS.
Ace Fight 8: Wings of Theve doesn’t have a built-in benchmark software. So, for our benchmarks, I used this cutscene.
I ought to make clear that the next are stress benchmarks. As an illustration, the primary mission was operating at 70FPS at Native 4K/Extremely on the NVIDIA RTX 5090. Nonetheless, there was a mission during which you’re a co-pilot, and the framerate drops to 47FPS. Under, you’ll find a shot from it. So, that is the explanation I selected the above cutscene. I don’t know if the later phases are as demanding as this mission.
The one GPUs that would present framerates over 60FPS always at 1080p/Extremely have been our prime three GPUs. The AMD Radeon RX 9070XT and the AMD Radeon RX 7900XTX have been additionally capable of present a clean gaming expertise, offered you’ve got a FreeSync monitor.
At 1440p/Extremely, solely the NVIDIA RTX 4090 and the RTX 5090 have been capable of present a relentless 60FPS expertise. As for Native 4K/Extremely, there isn’t a GPU that may come near a 60FPS expertise.
What’s additionally underwhelming right here is that the sport can’t scale effectively with its in-game graphics settings. At Native 4K, you may solely get a relentless 60FPS expertise on Low Settings. That’s on an NVIDIA RTX 5090. Ouch.
And that’s not all. Though I didn’t see any stutters in the course of the first few missions, I did expertise traversal stutters in the course of the cutscenes. These are real-time cutscenes, not pre-rendered movies. And sadly, they undergo from traversal stutters. That is fairly disappointing. Since these are traversal stutters, they occur on the similar spots every time. So, you will note the identical stutters each time you watch these cutscenes.
Graphics-wise, Ace Fight 8: Wings of Theve appears nice. It is among the best-looking arcade flight video games on the market. Then once more, we don’t get many video games like this today. To be sincere, its visuals didn’t depart me as speechless as Microsoft Flight Simulator did after I first noticed it. Nonetheless, it is a great-looking PC sport. The volumetric clouds look superb. You’ll even see raindrops while you fly by way of them. The planes are additionally extremely detailed. Total, the sport appears improbable.
All in all, Ace Fight 8: Wings of Theve is a really demanding sport. It has a full day-night cycle and a dynamic climate system. This is the reason the devs use Lumen. Sadly, the in-game graphics settings don’t provide a lot room to enhance efficiency. The one actual strategy to get extra FPS is to make use of an upscaler. So, there was clearly room for extra work on the sport’s optimization. Severely, your sport wants extra work when you need to use Low settings to hit 60FPS at Native 4K on an NVIDIA RTX 5090!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He’s a PC gaming fan and extremely helps the modding and indie communities. Earlier than creating DSOGaming, John labored on quite a few gaming web sites. Whereas he’s a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots could be discovered on consoles. John beloved – and nonetheless does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be top-of-the-line consoles. Nonetheless, the PC platform received him over consoles. That was primarily on account of 3DFX and its iconic devoted 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has additionally written a better diploma thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics playing cards.”
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