Styx Blades of Greed Performance Benchmark Review

Introduction

Styx: Blades of Greed is a single-player, third-person stealth-action game from Cyanide Studio set on the Iserian Continent—a dark-fantasy world on the brink of war between elves, humans, and orcs. Our beloved foul-mouthed goblin hero is back, but in this third game you get a semi-open world design instead of the linear corridors of earlier games. Cyanide clearly wanted to give players more freedom this time: metroidvania-style traversal upgrades gradually open new routes, and a clever Greed System tempts you to grab more loot than you should—at the cost of becoming louder and slower. New Quartz-fueled powers like mind control and time manipulation join returning abilities like invisibility and cloning, giving you plenty of creative ways to tackle each stealth puzzle.

Blades of Greed arrives a full nine years after Shards of Darkness, and the jump to Unreal Engine 5 is noticeable. Lumen and Nanite handle global illumination and geometry streaming respectively, doing away with the frequent loading screens that broke up the flow in earlier entries. On the upscaling front, there is support for NVIDIA DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation and Reflex, along with AMD FSR. There is no hardware ray tracing support, however—the game relies entirely on Lumen’s software-based lighting solution.

This review will evaluate the performance of Styx: Blades of Greed across a wide range of contemporary graphics cards, compare image quality settings, and analyze the game’s VRAM usage to provide insight into the hardware requirements needed for an optimal experience.