A hot potato: Upscaling technologies like Nvidia's DLSS have become a big asset for gamers who want to improve performance. For most people, they're optional features that help with the likes of ray tracing, high resolutions, or ultra settings. That's not the case for Remnant II, though, which is the first PC game "designed with upscaling in mind."

The first Remnant: From the Ashes is an excellent 'Dark Souls with guns' shooter. The sequel has been receiving rave reviews for addressing some of the original's faults, like the bullet-sponge boss battles. But there's one element few people are happy about.

Developer Gunfire Games has specifically designed Remnant II to be used with DLSS, FSR, and XeSS as standard – i.e., turning on the upscaling tech isn't really optional if you want smooth performance.

Following complaints about poor game performance of under 60 fps on even the meatiest of rigs – 40 fps with an RTX 4090 and Ryzen 9 7950X3D - the company posted a message on the official subreddit that read: "…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."

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by u/genericusername610 from discussion Technical Information and Troubleshooting
in remnantgame

While the Unreal Engine 5-powered Remnant 2 looks nice, it's not mind-blowing and doesn't offer any form of ray tracing or the Lumen dynamic global illumination and reflections system.

Gunfire Games has said it is definitely rolling out more post-launch updates to improve Remnant II's performance, though it's unlikely these will turn DLSS/FSR/XeSS into optional features.

With the launch of the much-maligned RTX 4060 8GB, Nvidia leaned heavily into its use of DLSS 3 and frame generation during the marketing and pushed FPS benchmarks with the technologies enabled. This is despite most gamers not wanting to see upscaling become the base standard for a game, especially when using it comes at the cost of a minor graphics hit or reduced latency.

Some are calling out developers for using upscaling as a crutch for poorly optimized PC ports; a problem we've seen many times this year. Sadly, it looks as if Remnant 2 might be setting a precedent in which these technologies become an intended requirement for games to be playable.