Update still in testing
Pearl Abyss has delayed Black Desert Online’s DirectX 12 and AMD FSR 3.1 update past its original August target. The studio said in an official post on August 27 that the update is still in testing, but it gave no new release window and no revised date for the follow-up FSR 4.1 and Nvidia DLSS support queued behind it.
The slip comes almost exactly four weeks after Pearl Abyss set that timeline in the first place. In a late-July roadmap reveal, the studio announced DirectX 12 support alongside FSR 3.1 and DLSS for August and September, with AMD’s newer FSR 4.1 queued to arrive once FSR 3.1 shipped. On PC, Black Desert has been running FSR’s original 2021-era spatial upscaler this entire time, without frame generation or the ghosting and shimmer fixes FSR 3.1 brought to other games back in 2024. For a ten-year-old MMORPG that still draws a large concurrent PC population, that’s a widening gap against newer engines shipping on both AMD and Nvidia’s latest scaling tech.
In the August 27 post, Pearl Abyss said it’s running more careful testing because of the wide variety of PC environments its adventurers use, and that “it should only be delivered once it is stable and polished enough.” The studio says it’s still prioritizing FSR 3.1 and DirectX 12 first, with FSR 4.1 and DLSS to follow once those ship.
DirectX 12 specifically has a longer history of not shipping in Black Desert than this single delay suggests. Players have asked for it since at least 2015, and for years the studio’s answer in developer Q&As was that DX12 remained under research, with nothing committed to a date. Measured against that decade of noncommittal answers, publishing an actual August target and missing it is still further than the engine upgrade has previously gotten, even if the outcome looks the same to players who wanted it this month.
The same August 27 update wasn’t only about graphics. Pearl Abyss also cut Guild League’s maximum match length from 20 minutes to 12, lowered the win threshold from 1,000 points to 600, and shortened the queue cycle from 30 minutes to 20, changes it says are meant to speed up the mode’s pacing. The studio hasn’t said when the revised DirectX 12 and FSR 3.1 timeline will surface, only that it will share one once its testing pass wraps.
