MindsEye proves a big ask even for NVIDIA's RTX 5080, and this UE5 game's getting a lot of flak

MindsEye came out yesterday, and it's really not going down well with some gamers - and performance levels are looking pretty wonky on PC even with a very powerful graphics card like the second-tier Blackwell offering from NVIDIA.

In case this one wasn't on your radar - which is entirely possible, it wasn't on ours - it's been pretty big news because MindsEye is from Build a Rocket Boy, a developer founded by Leslie Benzies, former president of Rockstar North.

However, the action-adventure thriller (which is out on PS5, Xbox and PC) that bills itself as narrative-focused (with cut-scenes aplenty, apparently) seriously challenges an NVIDIA RTX 5080 GPU as YouTube channel MxBenchmarkPC demonstrates. Check out the video clip above which was picked up by Wccftech.

This is an Unreal Engine 5 game - it may come as no surprise to learn - and with even with DLSS (in quality mode) and frame generation turned on, the RTX 5080 was only hitting about 70 FPS or so at 4K with epic settings.

Without frame generation and only DLSS 4 (quality) you're looking at around 45 to 50 FPS or thereabouts, and all this is in relatively sedate scenes where not a lot is happening.

At native 1440p (again with epic details) you're looking at just over 60 FPS, underlining that MindsEye is certainly a struggle here.

Some anecdotal evidence imparted via Steam reviews backs this up, with the likes of a reviewer with an RTX 3080 running at 1440p (with low settings) getting 20 to 40 FPS and some stuttering, with DLSS not helping.

A volley of criticism

A good number of those Steam reviewers are highly critical of MindsEye, too, blasting not just the performance levels, but the voice acting, poor NPC AI, various bugs, and a bunch of apparent glitches with the graphics. A common comment is that there's a distinctly unfinished feel to the game.

It's not all bad, though - the one positive point that constantly emerges is that the story is good and keeps you engaged. There are fans of the game who are saying it's decent enough, and that both combat and driving are solid - and they're hopeful that MindsEye should improve when patched. Fingers crossed that's the case.

It could be one to watch, then, but MindsEye has a long way to go to recover from this launch. And it doesn't help that there's a whole lot of suspicion around the developer not providing review code to the game critics out there, either, a move that's been regarded as cynical, of course.