Remnant II Devs Says PC Port Designed With Upscaling In Mind: DLSS, FSR & XeSS A Necessity To Achieve Smooth Gameplay

The developers of Remnant II, Gunfire Games, have admitted that the title relies heavily on upscaling tech such as DLSS, FSR & XeSS to achieve optimal performance on PC.

Gunfire Games, Remnant II, is the latest title to feature support for upscaling technologies from all major PC GPU vendors including NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel. The game is powered by Unreal Engine 5 and while the visuals look solid in our PC port impressions, the game doesn't utilize the full Unreal Engine 5 capabilities such as Lumen which is used to enhance the Global Illumination and overall reflections. This is however something that Gunfire Games may consider adding in the future.

In a technical post in the Remnant Game Subreddit, the devs listed down some general details that include a word on the performance of the game. Being transparent, Gunfire Games admits that the game was designed with upscaling in mind. These upscaling technologies are in the game to deliver the smoothest gameplay possible which means that without them, the game might run at a lower than intended framerate. Following is the full statement:

We've heard from a few folks about the game's overall performance. We're definitely going to roll out performance updates after the game's launch. But for the sake of transparency, we designed the game with upscaling in mind (DLSS/FSR/XeSS). So, if you leave the Upscaling settings as they are (you can hit 'reset defaults' to get them back to normal), you should have the smoothest gameplay.

You're free to tweak other settings for better performance – changes to Shadow Settings will make the biggest difference besides Upscaling.

Still having trouble with the game's performance even after using our recommended settings? Just let us know. We're here to help sort out any issues you're facing.

via r/remnantgame

Additionally, in our PC port impressions, we only managed to get an average of 71.8 FPS with occasional dips down in the mid-30s/40s. The game was tested on a high-end PC equipped with NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4090 GPU and an Intel Core i7-12700KF CPU at 4K resolution with max details. The game utilizes DLSS 2 so without the upscaling technique, running it at the same settings at native resolution will lead to sub-60 FPS which is by no means acceptable given this is the fastest PC GPU we are talking about.

I highly recommend *not buying* Remnant 2 on PC as its devs basically admit to using temporal upscaling techs as a crutch to mitigate a complete lack of optimization. The game reportedly runs very poorly while not looking that good and not even using any form of ray tracing. pic.twitter.com/cmFplABqQN

— Sebastian Castellanos (@Sebasti66855537) July 23, 2023

Designed with upscaling in mind...

Come on, optimize your games! https://t.co/C8ehboMzPN

— CapFrameX (@CapFrameX) July 23, 2023

A game implementing DLSS, FSR and XeSS is good.

A game relying on DLSS, FSR and XeSS to achieve acceptable performance is not good. https://t.co/TMASoxW41C

— Charlie (@ghost_motley) July 23, 2023

Even the developers themselves put out PC requirements for the game that appear to be relatively low but in reality, you would need a very powerful system to run this game to its max potential. It's also not like you are running a path traced & a massively open-world title such as Cyberpunk 2077.

It may also explain why the devs didn't bother implementing Lumen as it would have even more taxing on performance. Our gaming chief, Alession, pointed out that DLSS 3 would have been a better choice for this game. More recently, developers have been relying heavily on upscaling tech such as NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR & Intel XeSS to fix the utterly bad state of performance of their PC ports. There have been more and more cases this year with the likes of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, The Callisto Protocol, and more.

There are also some other issues pointed out and most notably, the "Out of Video Memory" on the RTX 4090 which is something that I have also been facing on my own RTX 4090 rig. This issue occurs in various recent Unreal Engine games with The Hogwarts Legacy, Callisto Protocol, Layers of Fear, and even Atomic Heart. You can get the games running on some random instances but most of the time, the error just won't go away and there's no official fix to it by anyone besides some random guesswork

--Out Of Memory when Loading (4090 + others)--

This problem seems to pop up more often with 4090s and specifically 13900k Chips. But it might also happen with other models. If you encounter this issue, let us know what hardware you're using.

Some people have had limited luck with the following steps

Start the game in Windows 8 Compatibility Mode

Load the game

Tweak/Lower your Graphics Settings

Exit, then start the game normally (not in Windows 8 Compatibility)

Load the game (if this works, great!)

Go back to Graphics Settings and adjust the settings again.

Other people have had success just disabling overclocking. This is something we are still looking into, though in many cases people who get this error are getting it in other games as well. We will update this if we come up with any other solutions.

via r/remnantgame

All in all, while one should be excited about having upscaling techniques from all major GPU vendors in a PC release, that may not be the case here and those are simply there to cover up an unpolished and poorly optimized PC port which is the trend nowadays.