Remnant 2's upscaling settings are more necessity than nicety and players aren't happy about it
Gunfire Games, the developer of Remnant 2, has announced it designed the game around the specific use of upscaling technology, and some players aren't too happy about it.
Upscaling technologies such as DLSS, XeSS, and FSR are useful tools for pushing frame rates higher on hardware that otherwise shouldn't be able to do so. I'd wager to say most gamers see these technologies today as an optional way to boost your frame rates above and beyond the baseline frame rate your PC can deliver at native resolutions. However, the way in which Remnant 2 is going about things is by using upscaling as a fundamental part of the performance picture.
In other words, in Remnant 2, upscaling is used in making up that baseline performance, not to boost it.
We know this from comments made by the developer on a Reddit thread titled: Technical Information and Troubleshooting (spotted by WCCFTech).
«We've heard from a few folks about the game's overall performance. We're definitely going to roll out performance updates after the game's launch. But for the sake of transparency, we designed the game with upscaling in mind (DLSS/FSR/XeSS). So, if you leave the Upscaling settings as they are (you can hit 'reset defaults' to get them back to normal), you should have the smoothest gameplay.»
Some players have made it clear on Reddit, Twitter (sorry, X), and in Steam reviews they don't like this decision. They argue a game should run smoothly and perform well prior to the use of upscaling technology, and that upscaling should then be used as an additional measure, should the player wish, to boost frame rates—usually at minor to small expense to visual quality.
As noted by CapFrameX in their testing of the game, even the ungodly combo of an RTX 4090
Read more on pcgamer.com
