Remnant 2 is formally out after a three-day early entry interval, and PC gamers are already forming sturdy opinions. The sport is remarkably demanding, even supposing it doesn’t embody any ray tracing settings. On prime of that, the builders insist that the sport was designed with upscaling instruments like Nvidia’s Deep Studying Tremendous Sampling (DLSS) in thoughts, inflicting some backlash from PC gamers.
I’ve performed simply shy of 16 hours in the course of the early entry interval, together with a full marketing campaign run. Though Remnant 2 is demanding even on flagship {hardware}, you possibly can push down a lot of the graphics settings with out impacting the look of the sport. Listed below are the very best settings to get Remnant 2 right into a playable state on PC.
Finest settings for Remnant 2 on PC
Remnant 2 has a small graphics settings menu, however they’ll make a giant distinction in efficiency. Listed below are the very best settings I discovered after about 15 hours of gameplay:
- Upscaler: DLSS — Balanced
- Shadow High quality: Low
- Put up Processing: Excessive
- Foliage High quality: Excessive
- Results High quality: Medium
- View Distance: Excessive
These are the precise settings I performed by means of the sport with, and that’s with an RTX 4090. You possibly can push them so low as a result of they’ve a really minor affect on visible high quality, and in most scenes, you possibly can’t inform the distinction. Take the scene beneath. You get rather less sharpness with the optimized settings that DLSS simply makes up, however I’m struggling to see the rest that’s modified. There’s a contact much less shadow on the rocks, however the sharpness is there throughout the scene and even the reflections look similar.
It’s not simply this scene, both. As you possibly can see in the dead of night scene beneath, taking the Shadow High quality all the way in which all the way down to Low doesn’t affect the ultimate picture. The primary distinction is the tower within the again. With the Extremely preset, you possibly can see the shadow of a city up the slope close to the again of the picture, which is absent from the Low preset. That’s a straightforward compromise to make, particularly contemplating the efficiency enhancements.
With the Extremely preset, I averaged 62 frames per second (fps) in Ward 13, which is much from essentially the most demanding space within the recreation. At some factors, even with an RTX 4090, I dipped down into the 40 fps territory. Optimized settings introduced a median body charge of 79 fps in Ward 13, and it’s laborious to argue with a 27% increase in efficiency for mainly no affect on picture high quality. And with DLSS set to Balanced, my common body charge jumped as much as 125 fps.
I like to recommend conserving DLSS on when you can. Sadly, it’s solely out there on Nvidia RTX graphics playing cards, so when you’ve got one thing older or from AMD, you’ll want to make use of both AMD’s FidelityFX Tremendous Decision (FSR) or Intel’s XeSS. As you possibly can see above, DLSS is certainly within the lead relating to picture high quality, however XeSS isn’t far behind. FSR is the one setting that majorly impacts picture high quality, making nearly the whole lot throughout the scene look softer.
Some issues that want addressing
Though you possibly can increase your efficiency in Remnant 2 with the settings I’ve really useful, it’s laborious to miss the problems with the sport’s PC efficiency in the meanwhile. You clearly want an upscaler to hit a secure body charge, even on high-end {hardware}, however essentially the most urgent difficulty is the graphics menu. There are solely 5 settings they usually do little or no.
That lets you go all the way in which all the way down to Low with a number of the settings with out impacting the ultimate picture a lot, however it additionally means there’s a really slender efficiency window. The sport desperately wants extra graphics bandwidth to run on a wider vary of {hardware}. The silver lining is that the sport appears to beat lots of the shortfalls of Unreal Engine, which it’s constructed on. I noticed correct CPU core scaling even on a Core i9-13900K and little in the way in which of shader compilation stutter. If the developer is ready to flesh out the graphics menu extra, this could possibly be a really strong PC launch.
There’s additionally the DLSS 3 difficulty. DLSS Body Era on RTX 40-series graphics playing cards could make even video games like Warhammer 40K: Darktide playable, however it’s horrible in Remnant 2. In case you activate DLSS Body Era, you’re locked to 60 fps. Be mindful the DLSS Body Era creates half of these frames, too, so the sport feels prefer it’s operating at 30 fps even supposing it appears to be like like 60 fps. That is simply the worst showcase of DLSS 3 I’ve seen, and it could as properly not be within the recreation.
The builders say they’ll roll out extra efficiency updates within the coming weeks, and hopefully, these will embody extra graphics settings. They actually ought to, as properly. As we’ve written about beforehand, Remnant 2 has a number of the finest boss design we’ve seen in a shooter, and it might be a disgrace for that to go to waste because of poor efficiency.
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