If Remnant 2 challenges an RTX 4090 GPU, how is it on PS5 or Xbox? There's good and bad news

Remnant 2 has already been seen on PC giving the mighty RTX 4090 GPU a tough time with keeping smooth frame rates - and there's plenty of feedback on Steam about performance woes - so how does it fare on cutting-edge consoles?

The curious can check out a new Digital Foundry video (see above) which evaluates frame rates on Remnant 2 for both the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, as well as overall graphics quality.

To be fair, Remnant 2 (which uses Unreal Engine 5) does look pretty good for overall visuals - especially in the early stages of the game - and as Digital Foundry makes clear, there are some impressive visuals to be witnessed.

Unreal Engine 5's virtualized geometry system (Nanite) does very well for eliminating pop-in as you move around the environment, and offers an excellent level of geometric detail up close (individual bricks in a wall, as shown in the video, look highly realistic).

The downside comes with the smoothness in some scenarios, with Digital Foundry explaining that on PS5 and Xbox Series X, the performance mode for graphics is upscaling from 720p (to 1440p). We're told balanced mode is 792p (on average, targeting 60 fps) and quality is 1296p (targeting 30 fps).

Balanced mode does hit the 60 fps target much of the time, which is nice and smooth, but it's far from perfect, and can drop to the 40s or even 30s at times in some of the more difficult locations to render.

Performance mode is a similar story to balanced, but the kicker is it has some nasty screen-tearing effects going on, which makes this one to steer clear of.

The best results appear to be quality mode, which pretty much keeps the frame rate constantly close to its 30 fps limit (at 29-30 fps). So, ironically, the quality mode provides the smoothest gameplay here, we're told.

As for Xbox Series S, here there's no choice of mode, you're given 900p (upscaling to 1080p) targeting 30 fps. However, despite the lower resolution it's upscaling to, and that low frame rate target, Remnant 2 looks rather choppy here. It does hit 30 fps much of the time, but suffers from more dips than the PS5 or Xbox Series X, plus the motion blur effect is removed here, and this contributes further to a lack of fluidity.

It seems the Xbox Series S experience loses a good deal of smoothness compared to the others, then, despite pitching the visuals at a lower level - so that sounds pretty disappointing.

The best experience apparently comes on the PS5 and Xbox Series X - unsurprisingly - but what is a surprise is that it seems you're best-off using quality mode for smoother gameplay (at lower fps), rather than switching to performance. At least in Digital Foundry's experience, the latter's screen-tearing is a dealbreaker.