Remnant II Now Supports DLSS 3, But You Should Probably Leave It Off

Five days after the official launch (though the Ultimate Edition granted early access a few days earlier), Remnant II is going strong on Steam, where it hit a new concurrent player peak of 109,053 players yesterday, according to SteamDB.

While the game's user reviews on Steam are rather positive (80% score), they also mention some issues with performance. In my port impressions article, I noted that Remnant II could definitely run better, considering it's not pushing any cutting-edge features like hardware ray tracing or even UE5's software-based Lumen. I also mentioned that DLSS 3 (Frame Generation) could help in that regard. As part of the pre-launch interview, I received hints from Gunfire Games that the implementation was close to being done.

Indeed, the developers have already added DLSS 3 to Remnant II, albeit without mentioning it anywhere on patch notes or any other official channel. You can now find it right below the upscaler's quality setting. Of course, it'll only be available to GeForce RTX 40 graphics card owners.

Unfortunately, the implementation of DLSS 3 in this game leaves much to be desired, which may explain the lack of fanfare from Gunfire Games and/or NVIDIA. It's not because of the performance increase, which is definitely noticeable as you can see from the custom benchmarks captured with CapFrameX.

Running around the game's hub (Ward 13), DLSS 3 improves the average frame rate by over 55%, the 1% percentile FPS by 39.6%, and the 0.2% percentile FPS by 55% again. I also returned to the first world, N'emad, and dived once again into the Void Vessel Facility dungeon as I did during the original test. Here, during regular gameplay, the average frame rate increased by 42.3%, the 1% percentile FPS by 39.1%, and the 0.2% percentile FPS by 41.2%.

These are far from the biggest performance jumps seen with DLSS 3 in a game. Still, they are still sizable and very welcome in Remnant II. The issue lies with the quality of the implementation.

While the frame rate recorded is higher, the actual feeling of smoothness is worse when using DLSS Frame Generation. At times, it can even be plainly seen when the animations look choppier than without DLSS FG. Moreover, the image stability isn't great, causing a weird jittery presentation.

I ended up having to switch DLSS 3 off in Remnant II for the time being. Responsiveness is paramount in a Soulslike game like this, and it's subjectively far better with Frame Generation switched off. As for the causes, it may be due to incorrect implementation of Reflex, which is a key component of the DLSS 3 package. There's also no separate option for Reflex in Remnant II, unlike most DLSS 3 games.

At any rate, I'll investigate with Gunfire Games and report back. I have every reason to believe this will be fixed fairly soon, but in the meantime, owners of RTX 40 GPUs are better off using just DLSS 2 (Super Resolution) until DLSS 3 is properly implemented.

As a reminder, Remnant II is available through GeForce NOW, with the Priority tier allowing DLSS support and the Ultimate tier including DLSS 3 support. For Wccftech's verdict on the game, read Nate's review.

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