Sony has just released Returnal on PC. The game uses Unreal Engine 4, and offers a built-in benchmark tool. As such, we’ve decided to test it and see how it performs on the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 at native 4K.

As usual, we used an Intel i9 9900K, 16GB of DDR4 at 3800Mhz, and NVIDIA’s RTX 4090. We also used Windows 10 64-bit, and the GeForce 528.24 driver.

Returnal features a lot of graphics settings to tweak. From what we saw, the game supports both NVIDIA DLSS 2 and AMD FSR. However, there is no support for DLSS 3.

At native 4K on Epic Settings with full Ray Tracing, the NVIDIA RTX 4090 can run the game with over 60fps at all times. Returnal appears to be a GPU-bound game, and did not stress our CPU. Do also note that we’re talking about native 4K with RT, so it’s quite impressive.

It’s also worth noting that the game will compile its shaders the first time you launch it. However, and according to reports, there are traversal stutters. We’ll thoroughly test this and we’ll share our findings in our upcoming PC Performance Analysis.

Enjoy the following video and stay tuned for more!

John Papadopoulos

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." Contact: Email