Pearl Abyss acknowledged that the in-house BlackSpace engine used in Red Desert still faces performance issues in complex scenes, and the team is working on optimizations. Large-scale battles are particularly demanding on the engine: numerous characters, visual effects, light sources, shadows, and other objects may appear on screen simultaneously.
In an interview during gamescom 2026, Pearl Abyss Chief Engineer Kim Jin-hwan and Senior Head of the Engine Graphics Department Yoon Chin-ho introduced the current state of the engine. Kim Jin-hwan stated that BlackSpace still has shortcomings when handling particularly complex scenes, and the development team has already begun addressing them.
One of these efforts involves developing a scalable rendering system. The team aims to avoid a linear increase in rendering load as the number of objects, light sources, shadows, and textures grows.
The developers also aim to reduce performance dependence on the number of light sources and distribute workloads more effectively based on the capabilities of different GPUs. These adjustments are crucial for Red Desert to present a detailed, large-scale open world across various hardware configurations.
Currently, BlackSpace is capable of rendering complex scenes, but large-scale battles and ray-traced scenes still require the development team to continue balancing visual quality and performance. Pearl Abyss confirmed that the engine requires further optimization.