Resident Evil Requiem PC Review + Optimised Settings - A Good Port, But RT Is Heavy on 8GB GPUs

Hello there and welcome back to Digital Foundry. We've looked at Resident Evil Recquum in depth. We've looked at the PlayStation 5 Pro version with its raid trace loveliness and PSSR2. Uh we've looked at the other consoles. We looked at Switch 2, but so far we haven't looked at PC. And we're here to address that situation with uh general observations on the quality of the PC port and of course those all important optimized settings. And of course, the man to talk about it is Alex Battalia. Yeah, in spite of my health issues here, I did have the time to conglomerate all this stuff together and get some info out for you, the user, about how this port actually is on PC. Okay. Yeah, I think we should just get straight to it. All killer, no filler. Let's talk about the bad stuff, which is uh typical battalia mo for any given PC port. Start with the bad stuff, then move on to the good. What do you reckon? So, I think uh this is a semi-ypical um re engine settings menu and experience on PC. Um there's some bad stuff in there like uh as for years now, every single time you select the the resolution when you move your mouse off of it, it immediately changes the resolution. It's a very annoying thing for a PC game to do. Still does it here uh like 6 years later. Um, another thing that isn't that great is that a lot of your settings changes require the game to be reloaded. Now, it's not so bad because the game loads so quickly, but if you were in a spot where there wasn't a save room or you don't actually have a good sense of what it looked like before, you only have those preview images in the menu, uh, which can be good, but also don't give you the full like moving picture, especially for stuff like ray tracing where it's very important to see that picture in movement. So, that isn't that great to see. Uh, one thing that I don't really like at all actually is that this game doesn't have a field of view slider and it's uh a Resident Evil game that allows you to choose to be played in first person. And in fact, the grace portions of the game default to being in first person anyway. And the the the FOV is very narrow and on PC you're close to your screen and especially if you're Grace, your character is actually quite short and it it is if you're close to your screen like I am, it doesn't feel good at all to play in such moments sometimes, especially when you're in like a small corridor. Uh so I really do think it needs an FOV slider. Um another not too nice thing is that you can't turn off the game's film grain. Uh they do allow you to turn off chromatic aberration and lenses distortion, but for some reason not the film grain and actually does have a pretty heavy impact on image quality. It's everpresent and quite intense. Um some other nos on launch, path tracing doesn't work on Intel or AMD. Always not a fan of that. Feels kind of arbitrary. Um another thing is that path tracing automatically turns on ray reconstruction. Now, of course, it may be the best thing to be running with path tracing, and it probably is, but it's still good to have a fallback solution in general in case for some reason ray reconstruction doesn't work or if you're non Nvidia GPU and it doesn't work with those things at the moment. And previous path racing titles did offer things like, you know, like other Nvidia based noisers or other deninoisers in general. Uh, so you could run path racing on other types of GPUs. um it would be really great. So right now when you turn on path tracing it just automatically turns on ray reconstruction and there's no option in the menu to change it to anything else or even turn off ray reconstruction and you can't separately toggle ray reconstruction which would be great for the game's ray tracing which is as we've shown on PS5 Pro by its lonesome using the standard deninoisers that uh Capcom has put out. It's actually quite noisy and ray reconstruction would do a lot of heavy lifting there and you can't turn it on for ray tracing only for path tracing and it just automatically turns on. >> Yeah, definitely not great. Um, but that is all the bad stuff. I guess there's a lot to commend this version of the game as well and uh I guess we should go into that and I guess it starts by talking about your favorite topic shade shader pre compilation. It does have it and I'm looking at your notes here where it's described as very competent and complete. So, is this a uh # statut strugglefree experience? >> I mean, it's like 90% of the way there. There is no shader compilation stutter. Uh the short shader compilation sequence that um happens after you do the onboarding process in the game. Really simple. It also appears to apply for every single graphical option you can select. So there it doesn't need to recompile shaders after you select different graphical options. It's complete in that sense too. It's a full set. And uh when you get in game, no matter what you see, new, old, anything, it's a flat train time graph regarding those things. Uh, one thing that the game kind of has but doesn't have at the same time, at least as poorly as uh, previous RE titles in the past on PC, is when you move between areas, there aren't super large stutters like I saw in um, RE4's remake, but there can sometimes be small frame time perturberations there on the frame time graph, and obviously they will increase uh, in size. this, you know, less powerful your CPU is, but I will say they are at least subjectively in this game. Uh, they're not nearly as disruptive as they were in past games. The frequency of them is not as high and they are smaller on the same set of hardware, at least in my opinion, and uh that's also what Ryan reported back to me versus RE4 Remake, for example. >> Okay, so there is progress there. That's good news. Um let's let's crack on straight with the optimized settings here. We've actually got uh testing across two different GPUs here. Um representing RTX 40 series RTX 4000. We have the 4070 Ti Super, which we've just talked about. Uh we're going to be testing that at 4K DLSS quality mode. And um going back a generation, we go to the 3070. And um I guess we're choosing that because of the 8 GB frame buffer and the fact it is otherwise still a very very capable GPU. You know should be like a step ahead of the current gen consoles. >> Yeah. In best case, but as we'll see here, sometimes it requires certain levels of optimizations that you wouldn't be doing on a PlayStation 5, but we'll get into that. >> Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Because of the VWAM situation. >> The first and most important setting in this game really is the rate tracing. One thing that is really praiseworthy of the game is the fact that it allows you to scale from path tracing to ray tracing down to ray tracing off. And that is a huge scale in terms of performance and visuals. But as soon as you get past the ray tracing, uh, as in using that as your main way to scale performance, you'll realize that the game doesn't actually have a lot of scaling juice in it left anymore beyond resolution. And you'll see that in the optimized settings here. But at least the rate tracing is the first is your first place of stop here. And you'll see some really big gains if you go down from path tracing to the lower quality settings. Going from path tracing to rate tracing set to high is like 150% performance increase here on that 4070Ti super. Path tracing to RT normal, 230% performance increase. Path tracing to RT off, 350% performance increase. Uh you're going from semi unplayable frame rates there at that ultra high res on the 4070Ti Super to extremely playable frame rates, right? I mean, it goes without saying. I'm going to be making a video focusing on path tracing specifically here, so I don't want to belabor it too much in this video, but path tracing is going to give you tons of local light shadows, way more accurate lighting than even the ray tracing set to high. Um, ray tracing set to high essentially increases the resolution of the ray tracing over the RT normal. That'll mean um less aliasing, less flicker occasionally, but it is still actually limited by the same dnoising. So, it still has poor denoising results occasionally in the exact same way the RT normal setting has. Here, a GPU like the RTX 3070 technically has the oomph and the power to run rate tracing set to normal at output resolutions that are appropriate for that GPU. But the problem is it doesn't have enough VRAM. Uh, so it will be hitching if you were to run RT in this game, even set to normal, and so you can't really use it. Um, but if you do want to use RT at all, I definitely recommend for optimized settings here using those normal settings. uh because the difference between high and normal in most scenes is actually a lot smaller since most of the lighting in the game is diffused and not specular in which cases you don't see the difference and you gain uh quite a bit about uh quite a bit of performance going down to those RT normal settings. So definitely go for normal for RT optimized settings. >> Okay, so that's kind of like in line with what the PlayStation 5 professional is doing, right? So that kind of makes sense. Uh, let's talk about hair strands now because that was something that was uh fairly intense performance-wise on the prior Resident Evil 4 remake. So, how does it work out here? It >> it's going to be also performance intensive. I'd say the difference is a bit better than it was in previous titles, at least with one character on the screen as we see Grace here. Uh, on that 4070Ti Super, we see a 9% uh performance increase by turning it off. Um, but I would say the hair, as we're seeing looks way worse. Um, it's, you know, the PlayStation 5 version, they allocated the budget there to make sure that the setting is on, and it seems like a lot of the game's character modeling was designed around it. So, you get that kind of switch level hair that I don't think it is worth it. It does have a cost in VRAM. So, if you're on a card like the 3070 with its 8 GB, uh, it does have around essentially 500 megabytes that it allocates for that on a GPU with more memory. So, it is going to be competing for space with other things, which is why we're going to have to make other optimizations later on for a GPU with an 8 GB frame buffer. But here, I would say for optimized settings, definitely keep hair strands on as it's key to the core look of the game. >> Okay, let's talk about texture quality because there's obviously going to be uh VRAM implications for that, too. And again, historically, Capcom games have had some rather sort of bizarre settings uh selections there. So, talk us through that. Yeah. Well, basically in the past they always had like a quality level next to like a cache setting allin one and it was honestly confusing for the user and it sometimes gave results that were not intuitive or alternatively didn't actually match up what you what you think it should be doing. Here they've been simplified down to just like a high and a normal and a low setting. And you'll see that the difference between normal and high is essentially imperceptible. Uh it appears to be that is like the caching setting. Like the high will cache more textures. Um the difference between normal and high on a GPU with 16 GB was around 800 megabytes of VRAM. Um when the game started up the first time on the RTX 3070, it did recommend using the normal settings and the game did not hitch due to VRAM limitations on those normal settings. Given the fact that it essentially looks the same as that high setting, I recommend GPUs with just 8 GB of VRAM to use that normal setting and not high just to be on the safe side essentially. And PS5 here, as we see in the sidebysides, appears to be using either the medium or high setting, uh, which is visually identical in this shot. >> Okay, let's move on to mesh quality, which also has some VRAMm implications, which uh I wasn't really expecting. So >> yeah, it's not typical actually that we see geometry being so heavy in games, but here uh you get a slight performance bump from scene to scene on that RTX 4070Ti Super at that resolution 4K output. Um but you know that 2 to 5% isn't such a big difference. You would you don't actually see the difference in quality also too much uh in side by sides. You really need to do the back and forths here. So a user wouldn't really notice this, but you would notice in terms of VRAM on a VRAMm starve GPU like the RTX 3070 where you see roughly 700 megabyte difference between the normal and the low setting here. And since we are already uh increasing the amount of VRAM we are using by utilizing those hairstrand settings. Uh, like Ryan said in his notes here, I definitely recommend dropping down to the low setting here on an 8 gigabyte GPU so that we're kind of saving room on that GPU's memory for things that are actually visually noticeable versus things that are like this, not very visually noticeable. >> Okay, let's move on to screen space reflections. Our old friend with the RE engine, screen space reflections, they've historically never looked particularly good in this engine. So, what do you recommend here? >> Well, I mean, here it's a bit of a take or leave it leave it kind of setting. I don't like the way the SSR looks in this game, but also I don't think it looks particularly great with them off at the same time. Like, there's just reflections not where you expect them to in realtime scenarios. Um, you do get a near 80% performance uptick by turning it off, but here, I actually think for most users, leaving on SSR will make the most sense in this title. Other titles we've recommend turning it off, but here let's leave it on. >> Um, volutric quality. Now, traditionally, this is one of those settings that you dial back to medium or low in order to claw back a lot of performance, but not so in this case, right? >> No. And it's a little bit confusing cuz I think we've actually seen the opposite in previous RE titles. Must be some difference here in technique or just the general part of the frame time that it's actually taking up. But here you don't actually see a big difference between the high normal or even low setting and performance at least on a modern GPU. I imagine this is area where switch two level GPUs or Steam Decks might be able to get a good amount of performance back, but a modern GPU just has enough oomph in it to take care of this. I think in general most GPUs should be going for that high setting, but if you do have something like a RTX 3070 and want a little bit of extra performance there, uh you won't see too big of a difference visually on the uh normal setting. And yeah, you get a little bit back. >> Okay. And it looks like the PS5 is kind of using the normal setting though. >> Yeah, correct. It does. >> Um okay, so let's move on to shadow quality. Obviously key to the atmosphere of this game. So what do you think about this one? Uh not too big of a difference there in performance between the settings. Um yeah, once again, resolution of shadows isn't always actually the biggest difference in settings in games in terms of how much performance impact it will have. Rather, the biggest difference is unsurprisingly VRAM. Um, here the game was tested on an eight and 16 gigabyte GPU, but based upon the game's recommendation and how much added in VRAM you get there from going up to that max settings, which is a little bit placebo quality at times, I definitely recommend 8 or 12 GB GPUs just to use the high setting, which is more appropriate for them. And it also is unsurprisingly the setting that the PlayStation 5 uses in this scenario. and GPUs with more than 12 gigs of RAM uh can easily be going for that max setting, although once again, not huge differences. >> Okay, so let's talk about the other settings here. They don't seem to be that fundamental in terms of clawing back extra performance, so I guess you'd probably be leaving them on high, but um talk me through them. What do you think? >> Basically, things like ambient occlusion, they look pretty similar between the uh different settings there. Performance is very similar. Contact shadows a visible difference I would say but not a big performance difference on a modern GPU. Subsurface scattering definitely very noticeable differences especially between the off and the uh setting one above it. But once again in motion there's not really actually big performance differences on a modern GPU. And this applies to other settings like lens flare and chromatic aberration and and lens barrel distortion. Those are things that are up to you as the user to essentially turn them on if you want or not, including depth of field, which is an artistic effect. Um, here I recommend at least to keep the artistic integrity of the game intact as is to leave everything to on or the highest excluding something like chromatic aberration, which I actually for all my footage that I made for this game for my second video coming out has been turned off. So, really just turn everything up to the highest really. Okay. So, should we move on to an overview of our final optimized settings then across our two setups and uh I guess also how it compares to PlayStation 5? Sure. Basically, um starting with that RTX 3070, as I mentioned at the beginning of this video, when talking about optimized settings, the biggest differentiator in performance is utilizing RT or not. And if like we're seeing here with the game maxed out on the right with RT off versus the optimized settings for that RTX 3070 on the left, um you're only going to be getting about 10% back in performance because we're only making very minor adjustments and the rest of the settings don't scale too much beyond, you know, adjusting your internal resolution of the game. So optimized settings isn't the biggest deal. But if you're using something like an RTX 4070 Ti Super like I talked about earlier or any other GPU that is better at handling the rate tracing in the game with the proper amount of VRAM, then going down to that RT normal setting as I mentioned will be a great winner for performance. And scrolling through those optimized settings here, we can see that the difference between optimized settings, for example, on a GPU with 8 GB of VRAM and the PlayStation 5, most of those settings are actually very similar, excluding in those areas where we notice that on PC specifically, that you're going to get great VRAM wins by turning down a setting that doesn't have a great visual impact, like mesh quality. um for optimized settings when you're using rate tracing and you have a GPU that is more than 8 gigabytes. Well, it's similar settings just with those VRAM sensitive ones left on and of course using the RT normal setting which is your biggest bang for your buck rate tracing setting in this game beyond going full balls to the wall path tracing which I think ADA love lace GPU users and Blackwell users should just try out honestly just try it out. Okay, so yeah, it does look like raid tracing is one of the most transformative features in the game. And um well, I reckon the 3070 will probably have enough computational power to actually deliver a decent experience, but you do need that extra memory and 8 gigs clearly isn't enough. Uh 4070 though and those other 12 gig cards probably all right. But um what do you think about this port overall? >> Well, at the moment I think it is better than efforts we've seen in the past. I do like that they support all the upscalers that you really want here. Um, I do like that they offer multiple quality settings for ray tracing, which is something that I've criticized Capcom for in the past that they kind of only offer one console level of ray tracing. Well, here they allow you to increase the resolution and go full to the next level, path tracing, which adds in a lot more nuance to that lighting and just really enhances the overall appearance of the game. Still, there's some areas that I think require improvement. uh no FOV slider, not good for a first-person game, not no ability to turn off film grain. The situation with no uh path tracing on Intel or AMD at launch is also not great. And in general, I really want to see the ability to use ray reconstruction with the game's normal rate tracing if at all possible because the default deninoiser is cheap and you can see that it's cheap unfortunately. So, it'd be great to have a higher quality option for those who have the power to do it, but don't want to invest in all the uh frame rate, you know, uh that is sacrificed by going up to that path tracing. Okay, so it looks to say you're going to need a decent level of hardware to get a decent rate tracing experience, but you know, those other optimized settings should sort you out. And, you know, it's a fairly handsome game even without RT active. That's all we've got for you on this one. 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Digital Foundry is now fully independent! Join the DF Supporter Program and support the team: https://bit.ly/3jEGjvx The widely publicised path tracing bug in Nvidia GPUs has been fixed, hence it not being mentioned in this video - but what you will get are Alex Battaglia's view on the game's strengths and weaknesses along with input from our contributor Rayan, who delivers us optimised settings for 8GB and 8GB GPUs alongside PS5-equivalent presets. Examine the DF Website: https://digitalfoundry.net Go here to check out DF merch! https://store.digitalfoundry.net Subscribe for more Digital Foundry: http://bit.ly/DFSubscribe 00:00 Introductions 00:39 The Bad Stuff 04:05 The Good Stuff 05:58 Optimised Settings 16:52 Optimised Settings Summary 18:43 And Now, The Conclusion