If you’re a budding Muad d’ib who can’t wait to sweep across the sands in an ornithopter, or see an enormous sandworm, then you’ll want to download the new Dune Awakening benchmark. You can now give your PC hardware a workout to see how it will handle the new game, and the good news is that the game not only looks good, but it will also run at a decent frame rate at maximum settings.
With the Dune Awakening release date approaching, now is a great time to download the benchmark for yourself and see how your rig copes with its demands. I’ve had a play with the benchmark myself over the last day and night, and I’m pleased to report that you won’t need the best graphics card ever in order to run Dune Awakening at a decent frame rate. It also supports the key Nvidia DLSS and AMD FSR upscaling and frame-gen technologies.
You can download the benchmark for yourself from Steam right now, and it tests three scenes of Dune Awakening. The first explores a building on Arrakis, with wind traps, gadgets, and all the Dune gear you’d expect, and this test is designed to assess the performance of a base built by the player.
The second scene travels around a Harkonnen village with people hanging around the stalls, before exiting to an ornithopter outside, and the third (my favorite) follows an ornithopter zipping around the desert before a huge worm emerges from the sands.
I’ve run the new benchmark at various settings on my own Intel Core i9 14900K rig, using an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 and 4060 Ti to compare results, and while I appreciate the former is a high-end spec, the benchmark runs incredibly smoothly on this setup at 4K with maximum settings, even without any help from DLSS.
Using the Ultra preset at 4K, the lowest result is an average of 139.6fps in the first scene, dropping to a minimum of 122.8fps, which is absolutely fine. Add frame gen to the mix, and this goes up to 208.2fps and 174fps respectively. If you then enable both frame gen and DLSS upscaling on the Balanced setting, the frame rate goes even higher.
The other tests are less challenging, with the emerging sandworm scene averaging 265.4fps on my rig with DLSS frame gen enabled but no upscaling, and even hitting a maximum of over 300fps. The RTX 4060 Ti also runs this game well at 1080p, despite only having 8GB of VRAM.
Even without any DLSS features enabled, the game averaged a decent 67.5fps in the first test at 1080p with maximum settings, and this climbed up to 140.3fps (with a 122fps minimum) with DLSS upscaling on the Quality setting, and DLSS frame gen enabled. Basically, it looks as though you’ll be fine running this game at decent settings on an RTX 4060 at 1080p.
If you do want to upgrade your setup, though, check out our new RTX 5090 review, as well as our where to buy 5090 page, where we keep an eye on stock at various retailers around the world.
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