Immortals of Aveum, Ascendant Studios’ first-person shooter rooted in magic—not guns—is not performing all that magically on PC. Its August 22 launch day is preoccupied by stuttering, sometimes, crashing, and making the average PC sweat with the game’s ambitious Unreal Engine 5.1.
There was always a risk of this happening. Before Immortals’ release, Ascendant said in an Electronic Arts blog post that the most important thing was for the game to “be a truly next-generation (now current generation) experience on a technical level.”
“You can see in other fantasy games where they backed off on some of the detail because it wasn’t practical,” Ascendant chief technology officer Mark Maratea said. “We chose not to be practical. But in order to do all this we had to make the hard decision not to support older video cards and the previous generation of consoles. But there’s a hell of a lot more game to play.”
Immortals requires on its 1080p, 60fps low-end, 2019-era AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT or Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super graphics cards. On its high end, Immortals won’t perform in 4k or 120fps for any less than a latest AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX or Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 GPU.
Reviewers are calling those aspirational (and somewhat unreasonable—Steam’s ongoing 2023 hardware survey indicates 0.68 percent of users have the RX 5700 XT and 0.62 percent own the RTX 2080 Super) PC specifications accurate, though they won’t help with performance issues.
“Immortals of Aveum has by far the worst implementation of [RTX 40-series cards’] frame generation feature […] that I’ve ever seen,” Rock Paper Shotgun wrote. “The UI is plagued by flashing afterimages of incorrectly generated imagery. It’s not just ugly but unplayable.”
“Most games don’t stress out a weeks-old, mid-range GPU to anywhere near this extent,” RPS said.
Immortals started to feel doomed the moment its release date got shoved to August 22, so close to blockbuster Starfield’s September 6 release. That’s a tough window to try to put forward something new.
The game is “set in a fictional world of warring mage armies where you play as a street-rat-turned-spell-casting-chosen-one under the command of General Kirkan played by Gina Torres (Firefly, Destiny 2),” senior Kotaku writer Ethan Gach wrote earlier this summer. “At the same time, Immortals of Aveum is trying to do a lot of other stuff, as well. Maybe too much.”
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