Impressions on the PC Port of Remnant II

The highly anticipated release of Remnant II for owners of the Ultimate Edition is happening tomorrow. As a dedicated player, I’ve had the chance to experience the game on PC and thoroughly test its performance.

In an exclusive interview with Gunfire Games, they revealed that Remnant II is powered by Unreal Engine 5. This decision was made fairly recently, which is why the game wasn’t initially promoted as a new Unreal Engine 5 title. It’s worth noting that Remnant II stands out as the only UE5 game I’m aware of that doesn’t currently support Lumen, although it does utilize Nanite technology.

Additionally, Remnant II does not offer support for hardware ray tracing. In fact, the game seems to have limited graphics options for players to choose from.

However, it does provide the full range of display modes (Full Screen, Windowed Full Screen, Windowed), a motion blur toggle, and a frame rate limiter that includes options for 30, 60, and unlocked frame rates (although capping at higher frame rates requires an external limiter). The following settings are also available:

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

Furthermore, Gunfire Games confirmed that Remnant II supports all three upscalers: NVIDIA DLSS Super Resolution, AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 2, and Intel XeSS. The game also includes a Field of View modifier setting (a valuable feature in a third-person game) and an option to minimize input latency at the expense of a slight performance decrease.

Unfortunately, Remnant II does not have support for High Dynamic Range (HDR) displays, which is a significant letdown for a game released in the latter half of 2023. The built-in AutoHDR system in Windows by Microsoft also does not activate, meaning players are limited to Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) while playing Remnant II.

Now, let’s dive into the game’s performance. Given that it lacks cutting-edge features, one would expect it to run smoothly. While Remnant II does run relatively well, there is certainly room for improvement.

Using an Intel i7 12700KF CPU, 16GB DDR4, and a GeForce RTX 4090 GPU optimized with the Game Ready driver version 536.62, the game maintains an average frame rate of around 70 frames per second. Benchmarking a game like Remnant II can be challenging due to its procedural generation, but I utilized CapFrame X to explore the static Ward 13 hub and record an actual gameplay segment from the first world, N’emad.

Interestingly, the average frame rate during the recorded gameplay segment on N’emad was slightly higher, although the 1% percentile FPS and 0.2% percentile FPS were lower compared to roaming in Ward 13. There is a specific area at the beginning of the Void Vessel Facility dungeon where the frame rate drops to around 40FPS, as shown in the footage below.

Given the available hardware, this performance is somewhat disappointing. Although Remnant II looks good overall, it’s not particularly impressive in terms of lighting due to the absence of Lumen and/or ray tracing support. On a positive note, the game doesn’t suffer from severe stuttering like some other recent releases.

While Remnant II is technically solid at launch, I hope that Gunfire Games will enhance it further by incorporating Lumen support to elevate the lighting experience and adding DLSS 3 (Frame Generation) support to boost performance. With Unreal Engine 5’s native compatibility for these technologies, there’s no reason not to utilize them, and I anticipate at least the latter will be available in the near future.