Any benchmark for this game that doesn't stress a variety of locales will not present an accurate picture of the stress points of this engine. CPU usage of the game varies wildly from the opening areas where it's a piddly 12-15% on my i5-12400, to ~80% in the market area, where at 1080p DLSS performance, high settings (Ultra textures), vsync off (important as noted later) on my 3060, it drops below 60fps as a result.
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However, these CPU limited drops below 60fps are pretty rare so far, so likely most systems with CPU's better than a I5-12400 will likely not have an issue maintaining 60fps, at least from a CPU perspective. We'll see as the game goes along, albeit I may not play it for much longer due to the other problems mentioned below. A 10600 or R5 3600 though, will absolutely
not be able to maintain 60fps in the market area by any stretch. GameGPU is testing the opening area that uses a tiny fraction of the CPU that other areas do, so pointing to their benchmarks based on the first 5 minutes of the game as evidence that this game is not CPU demanding is pretty silly (it's also a relatively light GPU load compared to areas soon after that section, so it's just a dumb benchmark to draw conclusions about the games performance overall).
The other issue with this game, at least on fixed refresh rate displays, is the same problem A Plague Tale: Innocence had, and that is a completely borked vsync implementation. With that game at least I could fix it by forcing triple buffering with Fast Sync, being DX12 though I of course have no such option here.
Basically GPU usage can swing from ~85% to ~100% when panning a scene at points, causing you to lose ~10fps where you wouldn't with vysnc enabled. Vsync will always not be able to max out your GPU at 100% all the time on a fixed refresh display of course, but with it enabled you should expect to see drops to ~98%, not 85. It will be hovering in the 50's, then wants to jump to 45 fps, then to 40, then to 30. Very odd behavoir.
Finally, there's just shitty frame pacing in general. You can have large stutters with no corresponding frame rate drop. Input latency is also poor, which Nvidia Reflex does a good job in rectifying...but then adds even more frame pacing issues. This is the second DX12 game where I've seen it have this effect, Deathloop adds severe microstuttering with it enabled on my system, making it untenable for use in that game.
If this game had a properly frame-paced 30fps option, and Reflex didn't induce more stuttering, this could actually be playable at 4k with DLSS performance (which so far, works quite well) for a better than console experience on a 3060. But, not to be. With the GPU usage bouncing issue I would basically have to play at 1080p to maintain close to 60fps, which looks like crap, but the intermittent frame pacing issue remains. So impossible for now to get this game to provide a consist experience on my rig which is a shame.
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