Pragmata has just been released and is well received. 50,000 players are already enjoying it on Steam alone. Among these are folks at Tom’s Hardware, who put it through its paces on 18 different GPUs to see which ones are best suited for each rendering method and resolution.
Like Resident Evil Requiem, Pragmata leverages Capcom’s latest RE Engine to deliver realistic lighting effects on cutting-edge hardware using ray tracing and path tracing. It also offers most upscaling methods, including DLSS and FSR, as well as ray reconstruction and frame generation.
Starting at 1080p max raster settings, the game ran quite well even on mid-range GPUs such as the Arc B580, delivering 51.7 average fps. Even at 1440p, the Arc B580 was still capable of acceptable performance, especially when enabling upscaling. That said, moving to 4K sees most of the contenders drop below 50fps, with the RTX 5070 offering 51.5fps. It’s important to note that while rasterised performance was great, Tom’s Hardware noted that RE Engine’s TAA was visibly noisy or fuzzy across large parts of the scene at 1080p. Adding that while DLSS and FSR helped clean up some of this noise, there was still room for improvement.
Enabling ray tracing improved the reflection quality on certain surfaces and cleaned up some fuzziness. Though once again, this introduced its own downsides, such as faint and blobby reflections. But on the bright side, its implementation was fairly lightweight, delivering usable performance even on AMD GPUs.
At 1080p, all cards were capable of reaching playable frame rates, with the B580 sitting behind the RTX 3060 at 46.4fps. 1440p increased the demand, but nothing that upscaling can’t help with. Unsurprisingly, 4K was a no-go for many mid-range GPUs, including modern ones like the RTX 5060. Considering how the Arc B580 surpassed many in this test, the cause seems to be low VRAM capacity.
Path tracing, on the other hand, exacted a heavy load, requiring at least an RTX 5070 Ti to distance a bit from the 30fps range. 1440p put every card to shame, demanding no less than the RTX 5090. As for 4K, even the mighty RTX 5090 was no match, delivering an unplayable 26.9fps. Though again, these numbers are without upscaling or frame generation.
At least for this price, the visual quality was greatly improved, especially when paired with DLSS upscaling and ray reconstruction, correcting both the flaws of rasterised and ray-traced rendering.
Tom’s Hardware noted that DLSS FG was perfectly usable, as long as you kept monitoring input latency, adding that there is no real reason to avoid it other than a lack of hardware support. Overall, Pragmata seems well optimised, all while offering a wide range of eye-candy settings. Whether you own a budget system or a high-end beast, performance won’t be an issue.
