As per NVIDIA’s announcement, the PC version of Returnal received a patch yesterday (around 500MB in size) that added NVIDIA DLSS 3 and NVIDIA Reflex support, besides adding a bugfix for the Nemesis boss fight while playing in co-op.
By far the most important addition of the update is NVIDIA DLSS 3, also known as Frame Generation. Returnal, a highly acclaimed blend of bullet-hell, fast-paced third-person shooter and roguelike elements in a unique science fiction/horror setting, launched on February 15th for PC after winning over fans (and even publisher Sony, which opted to acquire developer Housemarque after the game’s success) on PlayStation 5 since April 2021.
As mentioned in the day one article available here, Returnal (ported on PC by Climax Studios) seemed to be ticking all the right boxes on the platform: NVIDIA DLSS 2/AMD FSR 2 support, Ultrawide and Super-Ultrawide display support, full support for the DualSense controller’s features, Dolby Atmos support, HDR display support, ray traced reflections and shadows, FoV slider, in-game frame rate cap, an extremely detailed built-in benchmark tool, and a plethora of tweakable graphics settings.
Unfortunately, it performed poorly on the most important count, the performance, due to constant stuttering and hitching that was present both during traversal and combat, even on high-end PCs. It might have been fine if the game had been a relaxed, laid-back RPG title focused on bringing the user into its world. However, Returnal is actually one of the most hardcore triple-A games on the market, requiring pin-point precision with dodging and shooting lest the user be forced to restart the cycle all over again upon death.
It was an unforgivable blemish upon the launch experience that led me and, no doubt, many PC users to wait before diving into Returnal. Luckily, Housemarque and Climax kept improving the stuttering issue with a series of patches, the last of which was released last week. However, GeForce RTX 40 Series owners can now get a further boost with DLSS 3. For my testing, I used the built-in benchmark tool. However, the benchmark only lists the ‘nominal FPS’ (the total FPS accounting for the frames generated separately by DLSS 3) during the test itself rather than on the recap screen at the end. As such, I had to use CapFrameX to capture the frame rate data.
As you can see in the above image, the testing quantified around 30FPS of improvement on my PC (i7-12700KF, RTX 4090, 16GB DDR4) when running at 4K resolution with DLSS Super Resolution set to Quality and everything else on max, ray tracing included. The average frame rate went up by 28.3 FPS, the 1% percentile by 29 FPS, and the 0.2% percentile by 32.6 FPS. In percentage, that translates to 24%, 34.77%, and 48.29% improvements delivered by DLSS 3, with the lower end benefitting most of all. A surprise in the DLSS 3 implementation of Returnal is that, unlike most games that support Frame Generation, Returnal does not lock Reflex to its basic setting. The user is free to activate the Boost setting that feeds (and consumers) more power to the GPU to keep the clocks high even in CPU-bound scenarios, further lowering latency in those cases.
How does it play now, though? Extremely smooth, I’m happy to report after over half an hour of gameplay. Returnal is officially stutter-free, which is excellent news for anyone who had remained on the fence before checking out the PC version. Whereas I had recommended holding off at launch, I can’t but reverse that advice at this point; if you have any interest at all in the premise, there’s no more reason to avoid getting into this fantastic game.
