Best Remnant 2 PC Settings 2026: Max FPS and Performance Guide

Remnant 2 is built on Unreal Engine 5 with Nanite geometry and does not use Lumen. That architecture shifts the rendering cost heavily onto shadow maps and view distance — two settings that most players leave at default. Before touching anything else, make these five changes:

Display Mode → Fullscreen (not borderless — gives the OS fewer reasons to interrupt the GPU)
Shadow Quality → Medium (worth 15–20 FPS on its own)
View Distance → Low or Medium (“was gobbling up performance” per community testing)
Foliage Quality → Low or Medium (prevents FPS tanks during outdoor boss arenas)
Enable upscaling — DLSS Quality on NVIDIA, FSR Quality on AMD. The developers designed Remnant 2 with upscaling as a stated necessity, not an optional extra.

If you only do those five things, you will have solved 80% of the game’s performance problems. Everything below is for squeezing out the remaining 20% and matching settings to your specific hardware.

Remnant 2 System Requirements

Gunfire Games published two official tiers. Based on PCGamesN’s system requirements breakdown and performance benchmarks [3], I’ve added two real-world tiers to show what you actually need for smooth play:

Tier	GPU	CPU	RAM	Target
Minimum	GTX 1650 / RX 590	i5-7600 / Ryzen 5 2600	16GB	1080p with FSR Performance
Recommended	RTX 2060 / RX 5700	i5-10600K / Ryzen 5 3600	16GB	1080p 60fps with upscaling
High-End	RTX 3080 / RX 6900 XT	i7-10700K / Ryzen 7 5800X	16GB	1440p 60fps+ with DLSS Quality
4K	RTX 4090 / RX 7900 XTX	i9-12900K / Ryzen 9 5900X	32GB	4K 60fps — upscaling required

One important reality check: at native 1080p Ultra settings, benchmarks found that only the RX 6900 XT, RX 7900 XTX, and RTX 4090 could sustain 60fps — and even the RTX 3080 dropped into the mid-50s [3]. At native 4K Ultra, no GPU currently achieves a smooth experience. Upscaling isn’t a workaround here; it’s the intended path.

Why Remnant 2 Demands Upscaling

Most games treat upscaling as a quality-of-life feature for weaker hardware. Gunfire Games took a different position: the studio explicitly stated they designed Remnant 2 with upscaling in mind as a necessity to achieve smooth gameplay [4]. Understanding why this matters changes how you approach the settings menu.

Remnant 2 runs on Unreal Engine 5 with Nanite — a virtual geometry system that streams and scales polygon density dynamically, eliminating the geometry pop-ins that plagued earlier open-world UE5 games. Nanite has a real GPU cost, especially when combined with the game’s complex multi-enemy encounter design. Unlike many UE5 games, Remnant 2 does not use Lumen (UE5’s real-time global illumination system), so the lighting cost falls back on traditional shadow maps — which is exactly why Shadow Quality is the single dominant performance lever in this game.

One thing worth flagging: unlike many UE5 titles, Remnant 2’s configuration files are hard-locked by the developer. Editing engine.ini has no effect. There are no console commands or per-INI tweaks that work here — the in-game settings menu is the only lever you have.

Display Settings

Setting	Recommended	Why
Display Mode	Fullscreen	Exclusive fullscreen reduces OS scheduler interference
Resolution	Native	Let upscaling handle quality scaling — don’t lower native res
Frame Rate Limit	60 or your monitor’s refresh rate	Capping at 60 reduces frame variance and smooths out spikes [1]
Motion Blur	Off	No FPS gain but significantly improves visual clarity during combat
Field of View	Default (1.0)	Wider FOV loads more geometry into peripheral view — keep at 1.0 unless you have headroom

The Settings That Actually Move the FPS Needle

Remnant 2’s performance is unusually concentrated: three settings account for the majority of your GPU workload. Adjust these first before touching anything else.

Shadow Quality — Your Single Biggest Lever

Community testing on an i7-8700 / RTX 3070 system documented a jump from 32 FPS to 56 FPS simply by dropping Shadow Quality from High to Medium — a 75% improvement in that scenario [1]. Even on high-end hardware, Medium shadows provide a meaningful buffer for boss arenas where particle effects compound the shadow cost.

The reason Shadow Quality dominates here is the UE5 shadow map implementation. Every enemy, projectile, and environmental object casts dynamic shadows. In the game’s dense combat encounters — multiple Aberrations plus standard enemies plus environmental hazards — the shadow rendering cost scales aggressively. Medium shadows reduce the shadow map resolution and cascade distance enough to matter without making the world look flat.

Recommendation: Medium on all hardware tiers. The visual difference between Medium and High is minor; the FPS difference is not.

View Distance Quality

View Distance controls how far the engine renders objects beyond your immediate area. In Remnant 2’s procedurally-generated dungeon and outdoor zones, this setting has an outsized cost because the Nanite system is still budgeting geometry for distant areas. Setting it to Low restricts that budget aggressively [6].

Recommendation: Low for budget and mid-range GPUs. Medium if you’re running an RTX 3080 or RX 6900 XT class card and want better environment detail in the outdoor biomes.

Foliage Quality

The outdoor biomes — Yaesha in particular — feature dense vegetation that compounds the shadow and view distance costs simultaneously. Foliage Quality Low prevents the worst FPS drops during open-area boss encounters and while traversing the forest zones. The difference is most noticeable during the Root boss variants in vegetated areas.

Recommendation: Low for GTX 1650 to RTX 2060 class hardware. Medium if you’re on RTX 3070 or better.

All Other Graphics Settings

Setting	FPS Impact	Recommended	Notes
Post Processing	Low	Medium	Controls fog, rays, chromatic aberration — High costs a few FPS, Low looks washed out
Effects Quality	Low–Medium	Medium	Affects particle density; can drop to Low if you’re below 45 FPS
Ambient Occlusion	Low	Medium	Adds depth to dungeon interiors; Low removes contact shadows and looks flat underground
Anti-Aliasing	Minimal	TAA	Irrelevant if you enable DLSS or FSR — upscaling replaces AA
Texture Quality	VRAM-dependent	High (8GB+) / Medium (6GB)	Does not significantly affect FPS unless you exceed VRAM budget and start streaming

Remnant 2 graphics settings menu showing optimized configuration — Remnant 2 graphics settings — shadow quality and view distance are the two settings worth adjusting first

DLSS vs FSR vs XeSS in Remnant 2

All three major upscaling technologies are supported. Here’s how to choose, and what modes to use. For a deeper technical breakdown of how each technology works, see our DLSS vs FSR vs XeSS guide.

NVIDIA DLSS (RTX GPUs only)

DLSS is the best-looking option in Remnant 2. The temporal accumulation handles the game’s dense particle effects (explosions, status effects, Corruption spreading) better than FSR’s spatial approach. DLAA — DLSS running at native resolution for pure anti-aliasing — is worth enabling if you’re already hitting your FPS target and want maximum image quality.

On a 5800X / RX 7900 XTX system, DLSS Balanced at 1440p pushed average frames to approximately 125 FPS compared to around 79 FPS with optimized native settings — roughly a 57% gain [1].

Mode recommendation: Quality at 1080p and 1440p. Balanced at 4K.

AMD FSR (All GPUs)

FSR works on any GPU, including GTX 1060 and older. It uses a spatial upscaling algorithm rather than temporal accumulation, which means it delivers slightly higher FPS than XeSS at the cost of more visible smearing on fast-moving particles and edges. For budget GPUs where raw FPS is the priority, FSR Performance mode is a viable path to playable framerates.

Mode recommendation: Quality for mid-range GPUs. Performance or Ultra Performance for GTX 1650 / RX 590 class hardware.

Intel XeSS (Intel Arc + all GPUs)

XeSS runs in a higher-quality DP4a mode on Intel Arc GPUs, and a standard mode on everything else. On non-Intel hardware it sits between DLSS and FSR in quality — better temporal stability than FSR with less smearing, but slightly lower FPS uplift [5]. Good choice for RTX 20-series cards where DLSS 2 is showing its age.

Mode recommendation: Quality at 1080p and 1440p.

Hardware-Tiered Settings Presets

These presets are tuned to the game’s actual performance profile — shadow and view distance heavy, not texture heavy. Understanding what each setting actually does is covered in detail in our game settings explained guide.

Setting	Budget (GTX 1650 / RX 590)	Mid-Range (RTX 2060 / RX 5700)	High-End (RTX 3080 / RX 6900 XT+)
Shadow Quality	Low	Medium	Medium
View Distance	Low	Low–Medium	Medium
Foliage Quality	Low	Low–Medium	Medium–High
Post Processing	Low	Medium	High
Effects Quality	Low	Medium	High
Texture Quality	Medium (VRAM limit)	High	High–Ultra
Ambient Occlusion	Low	Medium	High
Upscaling	FSR Quality/Performance	DLSS Quality / FSR Quality	DLSS Quality / DLAA
Target FPS	30–45fps	60fps	60–90fps+

For broader Windows and driver-level optimizations that apply to all games — HAGS, ReBAR, fullscreen optimizations — check our PC optimization guide. Those settings are worth applying before you load Remnant 2.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Remnant 2 support Frame Generation?

Not natively in the base game. NVIDIA Frame Generation (DLSS 3) and AMD Fluid Motion Frames are not officially supported. DLSS Super Resolution (for RTX 20-series and newer) and all three upscaling technologies (DLSS SR, FSR, XeSS) are supported and the correct tools to use.

Why are my frames dropping in boss arenas even with low settings?

Boss arenas in Remnant 2 combine high particle counts, multiple shadow-casting enemies, and status effect overlays simultaneously. If you’re already on Medium shadows and Low foliage, the next step is dropping Effects Quality to Low and capping your frame rate at 60 to smooth out the variance spikes. Remnant 2 is also sensitive to background resource contention — close Chrome, Discord video, and any capture software during fights.

Can I edit engine.ini for more tweaks?

No. Gunfire Games hard-locked the configuration files, so engine.ini modifications have no effect. The in-game menu is the only available lever. Any guide suggesting console commands or config file edits for Remnant 2 is outdated or testing on a modified build.