The developers behind Unreal Engine 5 game Remnant 2 have confirmed via Reddit that the game was designed with DLSS/FSR/XeSS image upscaling in mind to achieve playable frame rates on modern PC hardware — rather than being optimized to run at native resolution, as many PC gamers would expect. Unsurprisingly this did not sit well with the Remnant 2 gaming community, with many Redditors calling out the devs for laziness.
Image scaling is a very effective tool for improving performance on computer hardware. With the right upscaler you can get extremely good returns on gaming performance with a low cost to image quality. However, relying on upscaling tools from the start to achieve a playable performance is not very common (though it's becoming more common) in the PC landscape.
In the past, image upscalers on the PC platform were mostly used as a last resort to improve performance, not used at the forefront of improving performance, like they are with consoles. Another problem is that upscalers can hide bad or sloppy game optimizations behind the scenes, which will reduce the amount of performance a system can naturally provide.
Unfortunately, Daniel Owen on YouTube confirmed the developer's statement to be true, uncovering the fact that the game is extremely intensive at all graphics settings. At the game's default settings — consisting of medium graphics settings and DLSS performance mode — an RTX 2060/i5-9600K system was only able to hit just above 60 fps at 1080p resolution. Owen tried to get a 60 fps experience at native resolution but found this was impossible, even at low settings. On top of this, the game also suffered from severe micro stutter due to the older Intel CPU.
To hit 60 fps at 1080p ultra settings — a configuration modern 60-class cards can achieve with most titles — Owned had to jump up from the RTX 2060 to an RTX 3080 12GB. To get a similar performance at 1440p (let alone 4K), Owen had to jump even higher — to Nvidia's current flagship GPU, the RTX 4090.
There is no denying that this game is incredibly demanding, and most gamers will almost certainly be using image upscalers to run the game at playable frame rates. Unfortunately, we don't know how many of these issues are related to sloppy game optimization or if the game is actually that intensive.
The worst part is that the game does not look visually stunning, compared to similarly demanding AAA titles like Cyberpunk 2077 (and even Unreal Engine 5 demos), which makes the game’s reliance on heavy image upscaling pretty embarrassing. In fact, we’re not sure if the game even has any ray-tracing effects since the graphics menu lacks any of these more demanding options. Hopefully the developers will push out performance updates in the future that will alleviate at least some of the performance demands.
