Remnant II PC Port Impressions – Solid, But Needs DLSS 3 and Lumen

Remnant II is out tomorrow for owners of the Ultimate Edition, and I've been playing the game for a while to check the performance on PC.

As reported yesterday, Gunfire Games confirmed to Wccftech that Remnant II is powered by Unreal Engine 5. It appears that the studio decided to make the change fairly recently, which is why the sequel wasn't advertised earlier as a new Unreal Engine 5 title. However, it is unique in that it is the only UE5 game I know of that does not currently support Lumen (though it does use Nanite).

Moreover, Remnant II does not support hardware ray tracing. In fact, the port appears to be relatively barebones when it comes to graphics options available to the players.

It does offer all of the possible display modes (Full Screen, Windowed Full Screen, Windowed), a motion blur toggle, a frame rate limiter for 30, 60, and unlocked (sadly, you'll have to rely on an external limiter to cap it at a higher frame rate), and the following settings:

• Shadow Quality
• Post Processing
• Foliage Quality
• Effects Quality

Again, as Gunfire Games revealed in the aforementioned interview, Remnant II does support all three upscalers (NVIDIA DLSS Super Resolution, AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 2, and Intel XeSS). Finally, there's a Field of View modifier setting (a welcome bonus in a third-person game) and an option that minimizes input latency at the cost of a small performance loss.

There is no support for High Dynamic Range (HDR) displays, which is very disappointing for a game released in the latter half of 2023. Microsoft's AutoHDR system built into Windows doesn't kick in, either, so you're stuck with Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) when playing Remnant II.

But how does the game run? You'd expect very smoothly given the absence of cutting-edge features. While Remnant II does run fairly well, there's definitely a lot of room for improvement.

With an Intel i7 12700KF CPU, 16GB DDR4, and a GeForce RTX 4090 GPU (powered by the Game Ready optimized driver 536.62), the game averages around 70 frames per second. While it isn't easy to benchmark a game like this due to the abundance of procedural generation, I used CapFrame X to roam around the static Ward 13 hub and then captured an actual gameplay segment from the first world, N'emad.

The average frame rate was actually higher during the gameplay segment captured on N'emad, though the 1% percentile FPS and 0.2% percentile FPS were both lower than when roaming in Ward 13. Indeed, as you can see in the footage below, there is a particular area at the beginning of the Void Vessel Facility dungeon where the frame rate drops down to around 40FPS.

That's a bit disappointing, given the hardware on hand. Sure, Remnant II looks good, but it's not particularly impressive in that area due to the lack of Lumen and/or ray tracing support. On the upside, stuttering is nowhere near as bad as in some games released in the last eight months or so.

While Remnant II is perfectly acceptable at launch from a technical standpoint, I certainly hope Gunfire Games will soon 'level it up' by adding Lumen support for better lighting and DLSS 3 (Frame Generation) support to increase performance. Given that the Unreal Engine 5 natively supports both technologies, there's no reason to leave them on the table, and I reckon at least the latter will be available in the near future.

Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.