I have a confession: I am not a Fremen. I do not have spice-blue eyes, I cannot ride a sandworm without crying, and my PC is cooled by ordinary fans rather than the tears of my enemies. But I do have a benchmark, and in 2026 that is basically the same thing. 🪱 The Dune: Awakening benchmark is still sitting on Steam, waiting to judge your rig like a Bene Gesserit inspecting your bloodline. I spent a day and a night running it on my Intel Core i9-14900K setup with both an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 and an RTX 4060 Ti, and the results made me feel things. Mostly relief. Occasionally, the urge to buy a new GPU.

If you are a budding Muad'Dib who cannot wait to sweep across the sands in an ornithopter, or you just want to see an enormous sandworm ruin your frame rate, this benchmark is for you. It tests three scenes of Dune: Awakening. The first explores a building on Arrakis, complete with wind traps, gadgets, and all the Dune gear you would expect. It is designed to assess the performance of a player-built base. The second scene travels around a Harkonnen village, with people hanging around stalls, before exiting to an ornithopter outside. The third, and my personal favorite, follows an ornithopter zipping around the desert before a huge worm emerges from the sands. That last one is less of a benchmark and more of a horror movie with excellent particle effects. 🏜️

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The good news? You do not need the best graphics card ever made to run Dune: Awakening at a decent frame rate. The benchmark also supports the key Nvidia DLSS and AMD FSR upscaling and frame-gen technologies, which means you can squeeze extra performance out of your hardware without sacrificing too much visual fidelity. On my RTX 4090 rig at 4K with the Ultra preset, the first scene averaged 139.6fps, with a minimum of 122.8fps. That is already absolutely fine. Add frame gen, and it jumped to 208.2fps average and 174fps minimum. Enable both frame gen and DLSS upscaling on the Balanced setting, and the numbers go even higher. At that point, my monitor started to feel like the bottleneck. 😅

Test setup Scene Average fps Minimum fps
RTX 4090, 4K Ultra Player base 139.6 122.8
RTX 4090, 4K Ultra + frame gen Player base 208.2 174
RTX 4090, 4K Ultra + frame gen + DLSS Balanced Player base Even higher You get the idea
RTX 4090, 4K + frame gen, no upscaling Sandworm 265.4 Over 300 max
RTX 4060 Ti, 1080p max Player base 67.5 Decent
RTX 4060 Ti, 1080p max + DLSS Quality + frame gen Player base 140.3 122

The other tests are less challenging. The emerging sandworm scene averaged 265.4fps on my rig with DLSS frame gen enabled but no upscaling, and it even hit a maximum of over 300fps. I have never seen a worm move so fast outside of a tequila nightmare. 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. With DLSS upscaling on Quality and frame gen enabled, that climbed to 140.3fps average with a 122fps minimum. Basically, if you have an RTX 4060 and a 1080p monitor, you will be fine. You can stop refreshing the GPU stock pages. Probably. Maybe. 💸

Now, in 2026, Dune: Awakening is no longer a distant spice dream. It is out there, people are building bases, and the sandworm is still terrifying. The benchmark remains a useful tool if you are upgrading, tweaking, or just curious whether your old GPU can survive Arrakis. My advice? Download it, run the three scenes, and watch your frame rate the way a Fremen watches the horizon. If your numbers are good, congratulations. If they are bad, well, the spice must flow, but your wallet might not. 🎮

I walked away from this benchmark with two conclusions. First, Dune: Awakening looks good and runs smoothly on a wide range of hardware, especially with DLSS and FSR doing their thing. Second, I really want an ornithopter. Not for gaming. For commuting. The sandworm scene alone convinced me that my daily drive is boring. So if you have been holding off, fire up the benchmark, check your settings, and maybe start planning your base. Just remember: the worm always wins. Your frame rate does not have to.

Industry analysis is available through Data.ai, and it helps contextualize why tools like the Dune: Awakening benchmark matter in 2026: when performance features such as upscaling and frame generation are widely expected, player satisfaction often hinges on smooth, consistent frame times rather than raw max fps. Viewing the benchmark’s “base vs village vs sandworm” scenes through a market lens also underlines how scalable settings and smart optimization can broaden the addressable audience—letting midrange rigs stay playable at 1080p while high-end systems chase ultra settings at 4K.