Desperados 3 in the technology test – ComputerBase : Test |CUP | Specs |Config

tl;dr: After a break of 14 years, the Desperados series is being continued: With Desperados 3, the developer has changed, but the virtues have remained. The PC version is also in good technical shape. The performance is good and the not spectacular, but chic graphics fit the scenario very well.

It took a long time: after a 14-year break, the third part of the Desperados series appears. Desperados 3 is clearly based on its predecessors and still goes its own way. It starts with the development team, because the third part was programmed by the German team Mimimi Productions. The test clarifies how good the PC version is and whether Desperados 3 can match the quality of its predecessor.

The graphics create a dense atmosphere with many details

Desperados 3 takes up the visual style of its predecessor, but optically lies a few classes above. No, the game didn’t turn out to be a graphic blockbuster, but Desperados 3 still looks decent. The main reason is that all the cards are full of details, which is otherwise only available in large AAA productions in such abundance and quality. In addition, the lighting and the shadows are consistent, which in connection with the density of details creates a good Western atmosphere. Mimimi Productions achieved this with the help of the Unity engine, which in turn uses the DirectX 11 API.

However, not everything turned out perfectly. If you take a closer look, you will see, for example, with the animations and textures, that Desperados 3 is not a large-scale production. Likewise, the cutscenes are just kept simple. But that hardly disturbs the overall visual impression.

Desperados 3 offers enough options in the graphics menu to optimize the game on your own PC, but apart from that there are hardly any comfort functions: There are no sample screenshots and descriptions of the individual options, there is no FPS limiter. Only in-game up- and down-sampling made it into the game. With this, the set resolution can be reduced in 1 percent steps to 50 percent or doubled to 200 percent.

Three presets with little gain in performance

Desperados 3 offers three different graphic presets with “low”, “medium” and “high”, with high representing the maximum details at the same time. If you switch from high to medium, you have to reckon with a simpler shadow representation and simpler reflections. The differences are not too big, so Desperados 3 still looks good even with medium.

That changes with Low, then the game feels like no more textures and just looks ugly. In addition, many shadows are completely absent, while others show fewer details. In addition, the vegetation is kept simple. Low should therefore be avoided at all costs, as the game is then no longer attractive.

The FPS gain of the presets is only low in Desperados 3. The game runs with the medium preset on a GeForce RTX 2070 Super only 5 percent faster than with the high settings, on a Radeon RX 5700 XT it is hardly better 6 percent. If you switch to low and thus accept a large optical loss, you increase the frame rate on an Nvidia graphics card by a comparatively meager 20 percent, on a Radeon it is 21 percent. This means that the performance in the game can hardly be meaningfully improved through lower graphic details.

On the next page: GPU benchmarks and frame times