How to improve FPS in Remnant II (PC)
Remnant II is a Gunfire Games cooperative souls-like shooter that combines frenetic ranged combat with procedurally generated worlds and enemy hordes that put any CPU and GPU to the test. Built on Unreal Engine 5 with Lumen and Nanite pushed to the limit, it was one of the first major releases to fully exploit these technologies, which translated into very demanding performance at its 2023 debut. Later patches have smoothed the curve out quite a bit, but it remains one of the heaviest shooters in the catalog if you want high framerate in boss fights with particles and enemies on screen.
This is what you'd gain with a NVIDIA RTX 4060
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Calculations based on our FPS model combined with the % gain of each setting (measured in public benchmarks).
1. Quick wins (no visual loss)
Start here. Each one adds a little, but together they give +69% free FPS.
Resolution Scale / Upscaling (DLSS, FSR, XeSS)
The developers themselves designed Remnant II assuming upscaling would be enabled. It's the setting that recovers the most FPS with barely any perceptible visual cost on Quality.
Shadow Quality
Dropping shadows from Ultra/High to Medium is one of the changes with the best FPS-to-visual-impact ratio in the game, according to several technical analyses.
View Distance
Reduces geometry and vegetation detail on the horizon, especially noticeable in the procedurally generated outdoor worlds.
Foliage Quality
Biomes with dense procedurally generated vegetation are among the most demanding areas for the GPU; dropping it to Medium eases the load quite a bit without it standing out much.
Display Mode
Playing in borderless window adds compositing overhead; exclusive Fullscreen mode reduces input lag and frees up some performance.
2. Medium impact settings
Here's where most of the FPS is. Minor visual impact, major performance impact.
Nanite / Virtualized Geometry
Careful: dropping to Low disables Nanite entirely, which can introduce more "stutter" when loading geometry the traditional way. Medium is the sweet spot between fps and stability.
Global Illumination (Lumen)
Lumen is the dynamic lighting system that gives the game its characteristic look in dungeons, but it's also one of the biggest performance consumers in the whole engine.
Reflection Quality
Lumen-based reflections have a high cost on wet and metallic surfaces, very present in several of the game's biomes.
Post Process Quality
Includes effects like depth of field and motion blur that add little to a fast shooter's gameplay and cost fps.
Texture Quality
Unlike other settings, textures depend mainly on available VRAM rather than raw GPU power; keeping them on High doesn't penalize much if you have VRAM to spare.
3. Upscaling (DLSS / FSR / XeSS)
The biggest gain in the game. Compatible with almost any modern GPU.
DLSS (NVIDIA)
+55% FPSThe game's best image-quality option: it handles the dense combat particles and Lumen noise better than FSR thanks to temporal accumulation. On Quality it's practically indistinguishable from native.
FSR (AMD)
+45% FPSSimilar performance gain to DLSS, but with more noticeable sharpness loss, especially in vegetation and distant detail. Recommended in Quality mode to minimize the effect.
XeSS (Intel)
+45% FPSPerformance practically identical to FSR at most resolutions, with slightly higher image quality in scenes with lots of fine detail.
4. Tips by GPU
NVIDIA
- •Enable DLSS in Quality mode from the start: it's the single improvement with the best quality/performance ratio in the game.
- •On 8 GB VRAM cards (RTX 3070/4060) avoid raising textures and shadows to Ultra at the same time at 1440p or above to avoid saturating memory.
- •Reflex, if available in the menu, helps reduce input lag in horde fights at no fps cost.
AMD
- •Use FSR in Quality instead of Native + TAA: the game's native TAA is especially heavy and FSR offers a better sharpness-to-performance ratio.
- •RDNA2/RDNA3 GPUs benefit a lot from dropping shadows and Lumen to Medium, since dynamic lighting tracing penalizes these architectures more than NVIDIA equivalents.
- •Check that drivers are updated to a version after the game's 2023-2024 patches, which fixed several AMD-specific bottlenecks.
Intel
- •Arc GPUs work best with XeSS enabled in native mode (XeSS 1.x) instead of the generic DP4a, if the GPU supports it.
- •Keep Intel Arc drivers updated: UE5 compatibility improvements have arrived gradually per driver version.
- •Drop Lumen and shadows to Medium as a priority: they're the settings with the biggest impact on Arc cards, which start with less raw performance margin in lighting tracing.
5. Known game issues
Very poor performance at launch even on high-end hardware
In July 2023, not even an RTX 4090 reached a stable 60 fps at native 4K with high settings; the developers themselves admitted the game was designed assuming upscaling would be active as a necessary part of the experience, not optional.
Estado: Partially patched in August-September 2023 updates and successive ones through 2024
FPS drops during procedural dungeon generation and hordes
Loading moments for new procedurally generated zones and fights with multiple simultaneous enemies (hordes, bosses with summons) produced punctual framerate drops more pronounced than in the rest of the game.
Estado: Progressively improved in later patches, though it remains the most demanding situation in the game
6. Frequently asked questions
Why does Remnant II run so poorly even with a powerful GPU?▾
Is it mandatory to use DLSS or FSR to play well?▾
Has performance improved since the 2023 launch?▾
Which setting should I avoid dropping to Low?▾
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Calculate FPS for Remnant II →Calculations based on consensus of technical sources and our own FPS model. More about our methodology →