Returnal review: Laptop and desktop benchmarks

In terms of visuals and gameplay, Returnal is a rather unusual game that certainly won’t appeal to every action fan. Despite the game’s environments being mostly very dark, the graphics quality is exceptional for an Unreal Engine 4 title. Players will often find themselves in very gloomy and barren landscapes and indoor areas, but Returnal will blast the screen with a flurry of visual effects once combat begins.

Both the player character’s projectiles and the enemies’ energy weapons give Returnal a very unique quality as well as variety. As a result, the game offers an interesting combination of a dark atmosphere and a “disco” feel. It also has excellent game physics as well as pretty fast and fluid controls.

That said, Returnal is not completely free of technical hiccups. During our testing, we encountered some occasional crashes. The game also ran at the wrong resolution sometimes, but we were able to resolve this issue by selecting another resolution and then switching back to the one we wanted.

Returnal has to compile its shaders during initial boot-up. This is something that we have seen in various games by now, such as the recently reviewed Hogwarts Legacy . An absolute highlight in Returnal is its terrific graphics menu, which is unparallel in PC gaming.

The video menu itself has four tabs: display options, colourblind mode, HUD customisation and performance UI (this allows users to turn on several in-game performance stats). Those who like to tinker can spend a long time in this menu alone. The graphics menu is just as fantastic.

Besides a few convenient presets, there are over 20 detail settings and sliders to let you customise the games visuals to your exact liking. We especially want to applaud the fact that many of the settings are explained using not only words but also comparison images. Sure, some Ubisoft games, for example, already do this, but Returnal takes it one step further and tells you how each setting affects the CPU, GPU and VRAM.

The cherry on the cake: all changes can be made without having to restart the game. Ray-tracing diehards will also get their money’s worth. Ray-traced shadows and reflections can be enabled in Returnal.

Their impact on performance is quite manageable if you have a newer GPU. Apart from the graphics menu, the built-in benchmark also deserves much appreciation because it is so detailed that it is worthy of being used as a reference. During the almost two-minute benchmark, the game will show the frame rate as well as CPU, GPU and (V)RAM usage.

The benchmark even tells you which aspects of graphics are being tested in particular at a given moment (e. g. “Destructibles & Volumetric Fog”).

The benchmark culminates in the results at the end: there are many graphs and data to help you perform highly detailed analysis (see screenshots and video). Some of them are even available for the individual zones. Returnal’s hardware requirements are moderate for a modern shooter.

Although even powerful iGPUs such as the Radeon 680M are unable to hit 40 fps at 1,280 x 720 and the lowest settings (the game generally crashes on the Intel Iris Xe Graphics G7 ), it is possible to achieve 60 fps at Full HD with a mid-range GPU along the lines of a Radeon RX 6600M or GeForce RTX 3060 . For those who own a QHD display, we would recommend using a high-end GPU. You’ll need a Radeon RX 6800M or better to get more than 60 fps at 2,560 x 1,440 and on the Epic preset.

As expected, the game becomes really demanding at 4K. Turning the settings all the way up will push even top-of-the-line laptop GPUs (such as the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti ) to their limit. That said, anything over 40 fps is still considered playable in our opinion.

Needless to say, enabling ray tracing will make Returnal even more demanding. Whilst a high-end GPU is generally enough to run the game at Full HD with ray tracing enabled, you’ll need an absolute top-end GPU like the Radeon RX 7900 XTX to use the Epic preset and Epic RT. Because gaming tests are very time-consuming and are often constrained by installation or activation limits, we are only able to provide you with part of the benchmark results at the time of publishing this article.

We will be adding more graphics cards over the coming days and weeks. .