Gunfire Games, the developer of "Remnant 2," announced that it designed the game around the specific use of upscaling techniques, but some players are not too happy about this.

Upscaling techniques such as DLSS, XeSS, and FSR are useful tools for increasing frame rates on hardware that would otherwise be unable to increase frame rates. Today, I think most gamers see these techniques as an optional way to boost the frame rate above the baseline frame rate that a PC can provide at its native resolution. But the way Remnant 2 does it, it uses upscaling as a fundamental part of its performance.

In other words, in Remnant 2, upscaling is used to supplement baseline performance, not boost it.

This is known from developer comments in the Reddit thread "Technical Information and Troubleshooting" (discovered by WCCFTech).

"We have heard from several people about the overall performance of the game. We definitely intend to roll out a performance update after the game launches. But to be transparent, we designed the game with upscaling (DLSS/FSR/XeSS) in mind. So if you leave the upscaling settings as they are (you can press "Reset Defaults" to restore them), you should have the smoothest gameplay possible."

Some players have made it clear on Reddit, Twitter (sorry, X), and Steam reviews that they do not like this decision. They argue that before using upscaling techniques, the game should run smoothly and perform well, and that upscaling should then be used to increase the frame rate, usually at a minor or small sacrifice to visual quality, and if the player wishes, as an additional It is argued that it should be used as a means to.

As CapFrameX pointed out in their testing of this game, even the ridiculous combo of RTX 4090 and Ryzen 9 7950X3D could not achieve an average of 60 fps at maximum settings (3840 x 1600) without upscaling. This is not even full 4K, by the way.

With DLSS enabled in Ultra Performance mode, the same machine averaged 160 fps. This is a remarkable difference despite using a very expensive graphics card and CPU.

The problem is that not everyone necessarily gets the cold shoulder. The game supports DLSS, XeSS, and FSR, with DLSS being an RTX-only technology, while both XeSS and FSR are hardware-independent and can run on any type of card. [While DLSS is an RTX-only technology, both XeSS and FSR are hardware-independent and can run on any type of card. The way these technologies work is that they require some speed to deal with upscaling, and if the card is running at absolute maximum speed to spit out 15 fps, there is usually not enough horsepower left.

But the bigger issue here is that this is perceived as the beginning of a negative trend in PC gaming.

Upscaling is the best outcome for all involved. It represents (almost) free performance, it doesn't cost a penny, and a huge number of PC gamers can take advantage of it on their machines. It negates many of the performance penalties of graphics technologies like ray tracing and will be even better. But if it becomes an accepted part of baseline performance, it will no longer function as the performance boost that players perceive it to be.

Then there is also the fear that upscaling will become a lazy means of optimization. This is already a serious problem due to the state of many recent PC game releases. Looking back at the releases of these games, there is no doubt that even before "Remnant 2," there were several that essentially used upscaling as a crutch for performance, especially in heavily loaded settings.

Already upscaling technology is being seen as a cornerstone of game settings menus, and such ubiquity will likely lead to examples of games that will run poorly without some form of upscaling enabled. Whether or not it will work for all games in the future, I don't think Remnant 2 is the only game setting this precedent, but I also hope it doesn't become the inevitable future of PC gaming.