Last month, Cyan Worlds released an official remake of Riven. Powered by Unreal Engine 5, it’s time now to benchmark it and examine its PC performance.

For our benchmarks, we used an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 32GB of DDR5 at 6000Mhz, 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 556.12, and the Radeon Adrenalin Edition 24.6.1 drivers. Moreover, we’ve disabled the second CCD on our 7950X3D.

Cyan Worlds has added a few graphics settings to tweak. PC gamers can adjust the quality of Textures, Shadows, Draw Distance, Effects, Foliage and more. The game also has a Framerate setting, as well as an FOV slider. Moreover, it supports both NVIDIA DLSS 3.7 Super Resolution and AMD FSR 2.2.

Riven Remake does not have a built-in benchmark tool. So, for our tests, we benchmarked the Dome area on the first island. That area appeared to be the most demanding one we could find in the early parts of the game. As such, it should give us a pretty good idea of how the rest of it runs.

Before continuing, I should mention a bug we encountered while benchmarking. The game has been constantly changing the 3D Resolution Scale setting whenever we were changing our resolution. This was happening on both NVIDIA’s and AMD’s GPUs. Thus, make sure to re-enter your Graphics Settings and set Resolution Scale to 100 in case you change your resolution (that is of course if you want to game at your native res).

Riven Remake does not require a high-end CPU. At 1080p/Epic Settings, we were GPU-limited, even on the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090. So, most of you will be bottlenecked by your GPU in this title. Out of curiosity, though, I tried running the game on a simulated dual-core system. Without SMT (Hyper-Threading) there were major traversal stutters that made the game unplayable. When I enabled SMT, most of them were gone, and we were getting framerates higher than 70fps.

At 1080p/Epic Settings, Riven Remake requires at least a GPU equivalent to the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080Ti. As we can see, our top five GPUs had no trouble running the game. However, this is a game that greatly favors NVIDIA’s hardware. Not only that but it has major traversal stuttering issues on AMD’s GPUs. This appears to be a driver issue. As such, Riven Remake is currently smoother on NVIDIA’s GPUs. The game still has some traversal stutters on NVIDIA’s GPUs, however, they are not as awful as those we get on AMD’s GPUs. To put it simply, the frametime spikes are really small on NVIDIA’s GPUs, and most of you may not even notice them.

At 1440p/Epic Settings, our top four GPUs were able to provide a smooth gaming experience. As for Native 4K/Epic Settings, the only GPU that could always provide framerates higher than 60fps was the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090.

As said, the game supports both NVIDIA DLSS 3.7 and AMD FSR 2.2. So, those on weaker GPUs can use these upscaling techs so that they can improve performance. You can find some benchmarks and comparisons between DLSS and FSR in this article.

Graphics-wise, Riven Remake looks great. The game manages to capture the atmosphere of the original CG title, something that will impress a lot of old-school adventure fans. Not only that but I was also impressed by the game’s LOD system. I’m not certain whether Riven Remake uses Nanite. If it does not, then Cyan Worlds has used one of the best LOD systems you’ll ever see. There are literally no pop-ins in distant 3D objects. I did spot some minor pop-ins of shadows and lighting, but none at all when it came to the 3D objects. So, kudos to the devs for providing such a coherent image quality. All of the textures are also of high quality. However, they might get a bit blurry when you stick your face right next to them (I’m nitpicking here).

All in all, I’m pleasantly surprised by Riven Remake. The game does not require a high-end CPU, it can run smoothly on a wide range of GPUs, and it looks great. Those with “trained” eyes may notice some minor traversal stutters here and there (which are sadly exaggerated on AMD’s GPUs, so hopefully the red team will do something to fix them). Still, this is one of the best remakes I’ve seen to date. Cyan Worlds has done a terrific job here.

Enjoy!