I had rock-bottom expectations forAtomic Heart.I was confident I’d enjoy the game, but I’ve been burned by too many half-baked, stuttering, buggy PC ports over the past several years to put too much faith in an ambitious AAA title with next-gen tech from a first-time developer. It sounds like a recipe for disaster.
ButAtomic Heartnot only defied my expectations, it blew them away. It’s not a perfect game, but it’s nearly a perfect tech demo. It comes packed with some of the best visuals you can find in a PC game right now, and despite that, it runs well on a variety of hardware.
Ditching RTX
Atomic Hearthas been the centerpiece of Nvidia’sray tracingshowcases since the first RTX generation was introduced in 2018. That might surprise you consideringAtomic Heartdoesn’t support ray tracing on PC (or consoles, for that matter) at launch.
Developer Mundfish says ray tracing is coming after launch in a patch, butAtomic Heartis better off without it. It’s no secret that ray tracing tanks your performance, and with games likePortal RTXintroducing features like RTX Direct Illumination, it can make even high-end systems look downright puny.
I’m sure Nvidia would like another showcase of ray tracing to sit alongsideCyberpunk 2077andWarhammer 40,000 Darktide,butAtomic Heartdoesn’t need ray tracing. It would, as ray tracing normally does, add additional depth to lighting and shadows, but the traditional rasterized techniques employed by the game already look fantastic and save a lot in the performance department.
AlthoughAtomic Heartditched ray tracing, it didn’t ditch RTX altogether. Nvidia’sDeep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS)is available, including Frame Generation for RTX 40-series GPUs. Frame Generation works well in a game likeAtomic Heart,too. It’s not nearly as fast asMarvel’s Spider-Man Miles Morales,so artifacts are few and far between, and they’re tough to spot.
It’s not just for Nvidia users, either.AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) 2is available in the game, so you can boost your performance regardless of if you have an RTX GPU or not.
There’s an elephant in the room here —Atomic Heartpromised ray tracing for years through Nvidia showcases and pulled the plug just hours before the game went on sale. I think it was the right decision given how well the game runs and looks without ray tracing, but it’s still a bait-and-switch situation.
Stutter-free
The most shocking part ofAtomic Heartis that it doesn’t stutter on PC. I’ve grown accustomed to any new PC release showing some amount of hitching, but I’ve had zero problems withAtomic Heart.EvenReturnal,which I would consider one of the more stable PC releases I’ve seen in the past few years, would occasionally hang for a couple seconds and straight-up crashed on me four times during testing. The bar is pretty low.
In 15 hours ofAtomic Heart,I had one snag as I loaded into a new area, no crashes, and no steep frame rate drops. Even more impressive is thatAtomic Heartuses Unreal Engine, which is a game engine notorious for stuttering ingames likeGotham Knights.
A big reason whyAtomic Heartis so smooth is that it compiles shaders on your graphics card prior to starting the game. Shader compilation is the main culprit ofstuttering in games likeElden Ring,andAtomic Hearttook a page out ofUncharted Legacy of Thieves’bookby loading the shaders onto your GPU so there aren’t any hang-ups while the game is running.
Because the game is so well-optimized, features like DLSS and FSR feel less like a crutch and more like the free performance boost they were intended as. You also have a lot more room to experiment with settings.Atomic Heartincludes your standard suite ofanti-aliasingand quality options, but it also has sliders for animation quality to take some load off of other components in your system.
Between precompiled shaders, dense graphics settings, and plentiful upscaling options,Atomic Heartruns better than any AAA PC games I’ve played in the last three years — and probably longer than that.
With theRTX 4090, I was between 120 frames per second (fps) and 165 fps where myAlienware 34 QD-OLEDtops out with the highest Atomic preset. That waswithoutDLSS as well. With it, I was locked at 165 fps. Similarly, I was above 100 fps with an RTX 3070 at 1440p and DLSS set to Balanced.
Great on Steam Deck
Atomic Hearthasn’t joined the list ofSteam Deck Verified games, but it currently has a Playable status. I imagine it’ll get a green checkmark soon. The game runs excellently on Valve’s handheld.
At native resolution with the Low graphics preset, I was locked at 60 fps in linear areas, and between 50 and 60 fps in the semi-open sections. you may turn on FSR, either through the game or through the Steam Deck itself, but I never needed to. Plus, there’s a steep drop-off in image quality given how little resolution AMD’s upscaling algorithm has to play with.
Once again, precompiling the shaders is a big win here. It takes a bit longer on the Steam Deck than it does on a PC — about five minutes — but I highly recommend leaving your device to compile the shaders before running.
PC releases have been abysmal for several years, with the expectation being that you’ll need to endure at least minor stuttering and performance drops regardless of your hardware.Atomic Heartis refreshing because it justworks— even without ray tracing available at launch.
