Sony has just released its third-person roguelike shooter, Returnal, on PC. Powered by Unreal Engine 4, it’s time now to benchmark it and see how it performs on the PC platform.
For this PC Performance Analysis, we used an Intel i9 9900K, 16GB of DDR4 at 3800Mhz, AMD’s Radeon RX580, RX Vega 64, RX 6900XT, RX 7900XTX, NVIDIA’s GTX980Ti, RTX 2080Ti, RTX 3080 and RTX 4090. We also used Windows 10 64-bit, the GeForce 528.49 and the Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition 22.11.2 drivers (for the RX7900XTX we used the special 23.1.2 driver).
Climax Studios has added a lot of graphics settings to tweak. PC gamers can adjust the quality of Lighting, Shadows, Ambient Occlusion, Textures and more. The game also supports Ray Tracing for Shadows and Reflections. Furthermore, there is support for NVIDIA DLSS 2, AMD FSR 1.0, and Intel XeSS (this option is only available for Intel GPUs).
Returnal features a built-in benchmark tool that is representative of its in-game performance. In fact, this is one of the best benchmark tools we’ve ever seen (as it provides additional details about VRAM and RAM usage).
In order to find out how the game scales on multiple CPU threads, we simulated a dual-core, a quad-core and a hexa-core CPU. Without Hyper-Threading, our simulated dual-core system suffered from major stuttering issues. With HT, our framerates never dropped below 60fps at 1080p/Epic Settings/No Ray Tracing. As we can also see, the game can use effectively up to six CPU cores.
For our CPU benchmarks, we used our AMD Radeon RX 7900XTX. Returnal is yet another game in which NVIDIA’s RTX4090 suffers from major DX12 driver overhead issues at lower resolutions. As we can see, at 1080p/Epic Settings/No Ray Tracing, the RX7900XTX was 19% faster than the RTX4090.
At 1080p, PC gamers will need GPUs that are equivalent to the RTX2080Ti for smooth gaming performance. At 1440p/Epic Settings/No RT, our RTX2080Ti was able to provide a smooth experience. However, we were a bit disappointed by the performance of the RTX3080. At 1440p, it was only 13% faster than the RTX2080Ti. And as for native 4K, the only GPUs that could provide a constant 60fps experience were the RX7900XTX and RTX4090. At 4K, NVIDIA’s GPU was significantly faster than AMD’s high-end RDNA3 model.
As said, Returnal also features ray-traced reflections and shadows. Pretty much all of the GPUs we tested had no trouble at all at 1080p/Epic Settings/Ray Tracing. At 1440p, the only GPUs that could provide a smooth gaming experience were the RX7900XTX and the RTX4090. And as for native 4K with Ray Tracing, the only GPU that could push constant 60fps was the NVIDIA RTX4090.
Now the bad news here is that these ray-traced reflections and shadows introduce some additional stutters. As such, and until Climax Studios resolves them, we suggest disabling the game’s RT effects. Furthermore, Returnal has some traversal stutters (that happen even when you disable its RT effects). Thankfully, these traversal stutters are not that frequent and never occur during your battles. So, again, make sure to disable the RT effects otherwise you’ll get frequent and annoying stutters.
Graphics-wise, Returnal looks great. The game has a lot of particle effects, and its enemy designs are wonderful. There are also numerous high-resolution textures, and some amazing volumetric fog effects. Bullets can also bend vegetation and there are some cool destructible objects. Generally speaking, Returnal looks top-notch and has reasonable requirements for what it displays on the screen.
I should also note that the game plays wonderfully with a Keyboard and Mouse. Since this is a fast-paced third-person shooter, you’ll definitely need the extra accuracy that K&M provides.
All in all, Returnal suffers from some minor issues but it definitely feels great on PC. The game looks great and has reasonable PC requirements. It also has numerous graphics settings to tweak, and we recommend DLSS 2 for every RTX owner that wants super-fast framerates. Realistically speaking, I don’t expect Climax Studios to address the game’s traversal stutters as those were also present on the PS5. However, I do hope that the team will minimize or eliminate the Ray Tracing stutters.
Enjoy!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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Change the 9900K.
I dont remember, does the ps5 version had ray tracing or its an exclusive addition to pc?
It doesn’t and the game renders at 1080p on PS5.
John, your RTX3080 also delivers smooth gameplay at 1440p with RT. Average is around 70fps, and that’s very smooth gameplay. Game dips to 50fps, but that’s only minimal fps and in VRR era such dips are no longer relevant, because frames are still perfectly synced anyway and average gamer will not even tell the difference in input latency between 50 and 70fps on VRR display. Sometimes I feel like you play games just for the fps, not for enjoyment..
Also why arnt you testing lower settings? You still keep using 9900K, because you always say that you want to see what average gamer can expect, but I dont think average gamer with older CPU will run everything at max settings. Somethinges I cant tell the difference in graphics fidelity between max settings and just very high or high settings, but fps is improved a lot.
Pretty! This has been a really wonderful post. Many thanks for providing these details.
Wake me up when it’s March 23rd.
Very well presented. Every quote was awesome and thanks for sharing the content. Keep sharing and keep motivating others.
The game looks excellent, buying it from EGS today.
I think my only complaint is the textures are a little low res for a PC game, where you can see the texture filtering when looking closer up. I might also need to add extra anti-aliasing in the Nvidia control panel, as this game has a lot of mesh/shader/particle detail that can get a little shimmery.
I think this game is using too much TAA sharpening.
>buying it from EGS
No they have not, unless it’s been developed in part by tencent
Alonso !
Edit: John, apparently Returnal recommends using 32 gigs of ram. I happen to have 32 gigs installed and that might explain why I’m getting much better results. You might consider updating this if you have 32 gigs available for review.
I was playing the game with Raytracing enabled on my 3080 and was getting much better results than this. Even at 4k with quality mode dlss I was getting better fps than what we see here. I have a 5800x3d so not sure if that is helping my framerates but I did occassionally see MASSIVE drops. I’m talking down to like 20 fps but it only happened a couple time and went away when I disabled RT Shadows. I didn’t see much difference at all from disabling reflection so I left them on. Shadows doesn’t even make a huge difference but the performance drop is insane.
Seems like the game really likes using a lower resolution and DLSS really really works well in this game. The sharpening setting actually looks good while in other games I hate it. I get like 120fps with dlss quality at 1440p and like 80 fps dlss quality at 4k.
its the 5800x3d for sure, really want one, cant have sh*t in Brazil
He’s never gonna update 16gb of RAM and 9900k
I get over 120fps with a 4090 everything maxed out plus ray T at 4k native resolution running the benchmark tool. Something weird is going on if you’re only getting 87.
5900x
32gb DDR4 3200mhz
PNY 4090
Running the benchmark my average was 142fps, MAX 190, Min 49, running in Full screen mode.
Abnormal settings I have on that probably don’t make a difference.
Resizable bar is on but not forced.
Shader Cache size set to 10gb.
Low latency mode set to ultra.
Let me know if you need some screenshots.
The benchmark in this game is so excellent it tells you exactly WHAT is holding your system back too.
I’m on a 3080 getting wayyy better performance than what’s shown here as well. Although I’m also on a 12th gen i7 and 32gb ram.
Its most likely the 9900k bottlenecking or its a ram bottleneck from lack of 32gb that is holding GPU performance back. This is a very common occurrence in ray traced games released lately.
If you can pull off a solid fps without DLSS/FSR I recommend leaving it off. This game is liberal with the amount of shaders and particle effects and DLSS/FSR seems to have trouble keeping up, killing crisp details, and introducing shimmers and visual artifacts.
Been playing on Epic 4K 60fps on a 4080 so maybe it could be that high resolution letting me see the difference.
I’ve also haven’t experienced any of the RTX stuttering DSO reports, just the rare traversal one, but for whatever reason with my rig I rarely do experience these stutters as much as it seems all these reviewers do.