Remnant II has attracted a lot of attention for being one of the first major games on the market to be developed using Unreal Engine 5, Epic’s much-heralded new engine that will be at the core of a lot of future titles. Sure, we’ve seen demos like The Matrix Awakens running on UE5, and Fortnite now uses the engine, but a fully developed game that tries to use UE5 to push the visual bar? Those are still rare. Remnant II is far from perfect on PC, turning in so-so performance even with top-of-the-line graphics cards, and developer Gunfire Games has admitted the game was designed around upscaling tech like DLSS and FSR. But what about consoles? Well, the results are a little iffy there too.
The folks at Digital Foundry have taken Remnant II for a spin on both the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, and while they found the level of visual fidelity was solid, performance leaves something to be desired. If you’ve got around 15-minutes to spare, you can check out their full video, or scroll on down for our recap of the most relevant points.
On both PS5 and Xbox Series X, Remnant offers three visual options including a 30fps Quality mode, and 60fps Balanced and Performance modes. All three modes upscale to 1440p, with rather low native resolutions – Quality is around 1296p, Balanced is 792p on average, and Performance is a mere 720p. Despite those low native resolutions, Balanced and Performance mode do not hold up all that well. Balanced mode sometimes maintains its 60fps target, but can drop all the way down to the mid-30s. Oddly, Performance mode isn’t much better and it also adds a ton of screen-tearing to the mix. Much like the recently-released Final Fantasy XVI, it seems Remnant II’s Quality Mode is actually your best bet for performance – sure, it’s only 30fps, but it’s a consistent 30fps, only dropping a frame or two here and there. Meanwhile, the Xbox Series S only offers one mode, running at around 900p and 30fps, with drops into the mid-20 range.
If you’re looking for some console war ammunition, there’s not much difference between the PS5 and XSX versions of the game. The only difference is that setting your console to 120hz mode will allow for uncapped framerates on XSX in Performance Mode, while PS5 remains locked to 60s. That said, uncapped framerate also means even bigger performance swings, so it isn’t necessarily a big point in Xbox’s favor.
Of course, this is just one game and not necessarily representative of how all Unreal Engine 5 games will perform. That said, Epic has tried to sell us the fantasy of cutting-edge visuals without a large jump in hardware requirements, and it seems that might have been overblown. There’s no doubt Remnant II often looks nice – Digital Foundry highlights the game’s impressively-detailed objects and the use of Epic’s Nanite tech to eliminate pop-in. But it seems it comes at a cost. A cost even current-gen consoles and cutting-edge graphics cards may struggle to pay.
Remnant II is available now on PC, Xbox Series X/S, and PS5. Expect a Wccftech review soon.
