Without upscaling, even the RTX 4080 is not powerful enough
DLSS, FSR and XeSS upscaling technologies can significantly improve gaming performance. They help to achieve good performance on not very powerful video cards, level performance drops when ray tracing is enabled, or simply increase the number of fps to very high values on powerful 3D cards. However, it seems that now we have the first example, when the developers simply replaced the optimization with DLSS, FSR and XeSS.
Remnant II, a game based on Unreal Engine 5, was released by Gunfire Games recently. Players quickly noticed that one of the supersampling technologies was activated by default in the game settings, which is usually not the case. Moreover, disabling upscaling leads to an impressive performance degradation.
Everything is so bad that, for example, the RTX 4080 in 4K at the maximum graphics quality settings without DLSS produces only about 30-40 fps! Even Cyberpunk 2077 at the same resolution on this video card shows 50-60 fps. And all this despite the fact that Remnant II does not have ray tracing and does not even use Lumen technology.
The developers of Remnant II created their game this way
The developers quickly responded to criticism, saying … that everything was intended. We are not talking about the poor quality of the game, as, unfortunately, it was with many projects in 2023. It’s just that Gunfire Games originally developed the game with DLSS, FSR, and XeSS technologies in mind.
We heard from several people about the overall performance of the game. We will definitely release updates after the launch of the game. But for the sake of clarity, we designed the game with upscaling (DLSS/FSR/XeSS) in mind. So, if you leave the scaling settings as they are (you can click “Reset Defaults” to return them to normal), you should have the smoothest gaming experience.
You can tweak other settings to improve performance – changes to shadow settings will make the biggest difference besides scaling
Thus, the developers directly say that in most cases normal performance in their game can only be obtained using supersampling technologies. And if in other games, using DLSS, FSR and XeSS, you can increase the performance to very high, for example, by getting the coveted 120 fps, then in the case of Remnant II, these technologies are needed just to play normally.
