How Resident Evil Requiem PC Path Tracing Amplifies The Horror [Sponsored]

With path tracing on in Resident Evil Recreum, it is easy to see how important light and shadow truly are for horror. And it's always been this way. In film, it is defined styles, heightened tension, and crucially hid visual flaws from the viewer so that they can maintain immersion and not break that all too necessary suspension of disbelief. For horror video games, keeping things creepy by harnessing light and shadow is just as important, but it is arguably all the more challenging. Unlike film where you can just physically move or place a spotlight somewhere on a set to create mood in games, the reproduction or movement of light and shadow is directly tied to the technological level of the hardware running the game. The medium is inherently technical and historically the rendering power of the platforms running the games has limited how convincing light and shadow can look with various epics of tech driving how horror games look and play. Perhaps no series is better suited to show that fact off than Resident Evil. In the beginning with the first trilogy of games on PlayStation 1 or on late9s PC hardware, the ambition for visual detail of the lighting and the environments that the designers wanted far outstripped the capabilities of real-time 3D hardware at that time. The compromise was then to pre-render all of the game's environments in the highest quality possible, capturing all the lights, all the shadows, all the specular lighting effects on surfaces with highquality 3D geometry. These 2D images of the environments were mapped onto basic 3D scenes and real-time 3D models were superimposed on top. So, the main characters, the zombies, the game items were typically real 3D objects on top of 2D backgrounds. And since the resolution of the 2D environments were the same as the raster resolution of the 3D characters, there was a level of seamlessness there on display at the time. Many would be troubled to notice the discontinuity on a CRT, and many might have thought everything was actually in real 3D. This style of rendering images for a game imposed some big limits on game design, though, as you might imagine. You had stock camera angles in each scene with no player control over that camera. There was very little to no dynamic or moving objects in these environments. And of course, you had screen loads between the smallest game areas. The game's design, of course, leveraged these limitations to their advantage, with fixed camera horror being its own subgenre these days, but the ambitions of Resident Evil's designers went further beyond what the tech would allow in the late '90s. With the fourth entry and much more powerful hardware, Capcom ditched fixed camera angles, 2D pre-rendered backgrounds were gone, and now the world was in full 3D where the player had direct control over the camera and the main character, Leon S. Kennedy. For the time period in 2005, this was an incredible looking game on the Gamecube. Excellent character models, great animations, and some pretty cool effects work for that hardware. But the move to real 3D did have some downsides for visual quality in spite of its many plus points. In that jump to 3D, Capcom had to leave a lot of the lighting and shadow fidelity behind. They could actually achieve much more with pre-rendered 2D backgrounds in that area. So gone were the dramatic and accurate shadows from light sources that we saw in the previous games. There are actually very few, if any, accurate shadows in Resident Evil 4. Many objects in the game world kind of look disconnected from one another, ungrounded and floaty. Now, this is an issue many games from this era had, but it wasn't necessarily one that the previous games had. You can see this divide in lighting quality when you compare Resident Evil 4 from 2005 to the Resident Evil remake from 2002 on that same GameCube. The remake of the first game from 2002 on the Gamecube still used that 2D background tech, though at much higher resolution and with updated art. In that game, the environments are so much more detailed than what you find in Resident Evil 4. More visible geometry, lights that actually cast shadows from them, and there's just much more dramatic lighting in general. This makes the game have much greater contrast in its visuals. And honestly, I think the horror atmosphere is perhaps better maintained in remake than it is in Resident Evil 4 as a result of that reliance on pre-rendered backgrounds. The simplistic background rendering also meant that Capcom could spend freed up GPU and CPU time to actually have some real-time shadows here or there from characters and from superimposed 3D elements. So, as we can see with Resident Evil 4 and RE remake, the leap to 3D environments meant huge jumps in gameplay, but at the time it meant noticeable degradations in lighting quality and atmosphere. Arguably, as time went on, systems came and go, and 3D rendering in the later Resident Evil games is for sure much more advanced than what we saw in Resident Evil 4. Still, limitations of real-time rendering rear their head when it comes to lighting quality. Even later entries on powerful PC hardware still will have many lights in them which do not cast shadows, and environmental detail will be ungrounded and floaty looking, unnatural. And this is an issue that the pre-rendered backgrounds of old actually did not suffer from. More than 20 years later, real-time rendering still means basic concessions in lighting and shadow quality. Now, that is all the case until, I would argue, Resident Evil Recreum's PC release in 2026. There, with path tracing and a powerful RTX GPU, many real-time rendering concessions of the past for lighting are no longer relevant. And funnily enough, we have finally returned to that lighting and rendering fidelity of the older games like found in RE remake from 2002 on the Gamecube. But unlike that game, we no longer have fixed camera angles. We have a camera that we can fully control and lighting that moves and evolves as you play instead of being eternally stuck static in 2D. One of the best ways to show off how transformative path tracing is for Resident Evil Recreum is to show off how it compares in mundane scenes to the alternative renderers that the game offers. First, let's start off in this simple scene when we take over Grace in a small room. There's not a lot going on here. And here we're looking at the room without any ray tracing on. Path tracing is off as well. It's a simplistic area. And I think my previous point about modern games lacking shadow casting lights is well played out with what we see in front of us here. Even though the room is tiny with few lights in it, game developers still have to limit how many shadow casting lights are used in rasterization. Shadow maps in rasterization scale poorly beyond a small number of lights using them because each and every light that is shadow casting needs to rerender the scene in front of it again to have shadows and that becomes prohibitively expensive with multiple lights. So lighting and technical developers will limit their amount in any given scene. And we can see this over here toward the corner of room where the mirror is. The light above the mirror here and the sink is not shadow casting. So if we look at the sink, we can see how it lacks any direct shadows from itself. The faucet and all of the lighting there is essentially bleeding through the backside of the sink. Indirect lighting is also technically not the best here with the shadowy areas being perhaps a bit singular in tone. But the biggest problem with the visuals in this scene without ray tracing is the lack of direct shadows from the lights. Now let's flick on the game's standard ray tracing implementation. Here it's turning on rayraced indirect diffuse lighting and specular lighting, also known as rayrace GI and rayraced reflections. Putting the rasterized view next to the rayraced view. You might be surprised actually at how similar they look to one another. You're getting differences in local bounce lighting like the inside of the sink being a bit lighter and you're seeing differences in reflections like the metal faucet looking a bit better. But the largest difference in the scene is due to the lack of direct shadows and the base RT in this game is not affecting that. The lamp above the sink is still not shadow casting as direct shadows are still handled by shadow maps with RT on and the limitations I mentioned earlier still apply. Now let's turn on path tracing with the game's path tracing implementation. Each and every game light source is now shadow casting and it creates a big visual difference in a scene like this where the previous techniques shown off were without direct shadows. The sill above the sink is now casting shadows onto the sink below and the wall adjacent to it. The area below the sink now is also properly darkened instead of glowing oddly like it was before because the sink is now casting a shadow. We also get different types of shadows here. Sharp shadows near the faucet and softer ones on the wall from the sill above it. Even the walls wood detailing benefits greatly here from path tracing. Previously, even the rayraced wall lacked definitive self- shadowing. It has that kind of normal mapped video gamey look. With proper self- shadowing, with path tracing, I would argue it looks almost completely different. Going back and forth between all three versions of the scene, I think it's plain to see how much path tracing adds to such a mundane scenario. And a great deal of this difference comes from the fact that now all lights are going to be shadow casting with path tracing on. And that's only one part of what path tracing does. In aggregate, path tracing is doing about three big things differently here. It is making every light have pixel accurate direct shadows as I just showed off and as many other examples could show off where objects are now grounded in ways that they weren't before and their surface detail will be enhanced because now there's self shadows there that weren't there before. This grounding and enhancing of detail plays back heavily into the horror mood that I talked about at the beginning of this video. Much like the best examples from horror films, Resident Evil Recquum often uses stark singular light sources in scenes that are surrounded by utter darkness, giving harsh shadows to every object. In a film, all these shadows are of course perfect. There's nothing floaty and ungrounded looking, which makes sense cuz these are real lights in the real world. In a game like Resident Evil Reququum without path tracing on, it's actually common to see how the shadow maps are not up to par to reveal that level of detail. They make objects kind of float over the surface they are laying or sitting on. Like we see in these scenes here, papers, pens, typewriters, buttons. Almost every object looks detached from the surface it is actually on. And anytime an object does not look situated on its surface or in its environment, I often describe it as gamey on Digital Foundry. And this lack of grounded visuals is an issue that horror games have suffered from for the last 30 years of real-time rendering. Flip-on path tracing and that gamey floatiness is gone. The visuals now are more akin to the precision of shadowing you would see in a real life horror film. and Resident Evil's atmosphere is ratcheted up considerably when lighting actually starts to ground objects. You can see that all throughout these environmental shots I've made, but I honestly think it is perhaps best seen when you look at the game's characters. Take a look at Grace here. Without path tracing, deficiencies in direct shadows make her face look almost sandpaper-like. Her eyes start to glow strangely. Her hair and face look detached from one another and odd. There's a lot of acting going on in the animation there, but it's honestly hard to see. With path tracing, it looks like the lighting director finally arrived on set. Harsh shadows are now visible under her eyes and behind her hair, dramatically enhancing that acting performance that is found in the animation. You can see the doubt, the terror, and all the trauma that is suddenly visible. Whereas without path tracing, improper shadows essentially erase all the emotion there. This is how path-raced direct shadows really enhance the horror mood that this game can have. The game's path tracing is also doing two other big boosts. It's increasing indirect lighting accuracy and reflection accuracy. Reflections are probably the second most obvious area where path tracing is going to play big dividends. Let's take a look at another shot in that room by looking at the mirror without RT on. as we see here is a standard Q map in that mirror reflection static and nothing dynamic is reflected. Now let's turn on the game's ray tracing set to high. As we can see, grace is now reflected in that mirror, but I would say it's a bit compromised. The amount of rays shot out is low and denoising might look crude. It's hard to make out any of the detail in that reflection of grace. Now, let's turn on path tracing. The amount of rays per pixel shot out is much greater and denoising is now completely different with DLSS ray reconstructions transformer model being active. And this is going to greatly enhance the detail of the reflection since it's path tracing multiple bounces of that light are traced. So we can see reflections and bounce lighting and other shadows in the reflection here. Shadows from her hair on her face, reflective glints in her eye. All that is not present in the simpler single bounce ray tracing to the left here. That's kind of a parlor trick difference though. The biggest difference from path tracing in reflections comes from the stability of the reflections. Without path tracing on, even the high ray tracing setting shows off notable resolution deficiencies. There's flicker and aliasing that comes from the game standard deninoiser and the amount of rays shot out for reflections. With path tracing on, you get a lot more rays per pixel and ray reconstruction is now enabled. So reflections are going to look much higher res and much more stable. They're not going to have the same flicker or aliasing on edges that we see in the game's standard ray tracing implementation. The third and last big difference from path tracing is in indirect diffuse lighting or global illumination as it is often called. Here, the game with ray tracing set to on or high does include a pass of rayraced global illumination, but it is limited in the amount of bounces it has and in its lighting precision. A really good example of the difference can be seen in the more contrasty areas of the game indoors. Take this room here for example, with the main light off and a single bedside lamp lighting up the area here. The game standard ray trace GI is bouncing some light around, but the area surrounding that lamp does fall off to dark rather quickly. Turning on path tracing, we can see here how all the extra bounces and precision come to work, lighting up the switch behind the bed, creating some soft shadows behind the curtain against the wall and of course brightening up the area close to the lamp itself. The intensity of the light is more localized. We can see a similar effect in this area here in the adjacent hallway. With the base RTGI on, we get some bounce lighting from the floor lighting up the ceiling above, but arguably not as much as it ought to have. Turn on path tracing, and many more bounces of light flood the scene. The added precision from those bounces gives us some neat new effects, too, like subtle shadows behind the lamp on the ceiling forming in those areas where the bounce light is obscured. that's missing completely in the RTGI presentation. That's actually pretty common to see added in indirect shadows in areas with the path tracing that just aren't there with the RTGI and increases the contrast in those areas that are already dark. The extra layer of bounce light follows you around too while you're walking with your flashlight. And here we can see on the left with RTGI on that there is some bounce light from the flashlight as it hits the chair, but not too much bounce light for it being point blank against it. On the right though with path tracing, there's a lot more of that orang-ish color from the leather bouncing against the wall. And we even get subtle indirect shadows in that bounce lighting from the gun barrel obscuring the light. It's a lot of ultra fine per pixel detail thanks to added bounces and of course many more rays per pixel. Much like with reflections, having ray reconstruction apply to global illumination results is perhaps even more noticeable than the added in bounce light. In any given moment, rough indirectly lit surfaces will typically have a much more stable lighting presentation with less flicker, less fireflies, and less fizzle. With all the areas path tracing improves added up together, the final presentation of Resident Evil Reququum on PC is visually arresting and the horror experience from that is sublime. With more accurate lighting, characters and objects are actually grounded in a way they simply weren't before. More like the horror films that inspire this series, allowing the terror to come through and with none of that visual gaminess rearing its ugly head. The pixel accurate path trace visuals really do remind me of those oh so perfectly rendered backgrounds from 2002's Resident Evil remake, except here we see them running in real time and at 4K and at hundreds of frames per second. On a PC with this game, you essentially have a nextG experience above that which the current crop of consoles can manage. And arguably one of the best parts of this path tracing is you can experience its generationally better visuals on something like an RTX 4070 as we see on the right here in this comparison with the PS5 Pro which is on the left. You don't need an RTX 5090 to enjoy great graphical advancements from path tracing. With optimized settings as seen here and path tracing enabled, you can have far better ray tracing detail, more nuanced reflections, shadows and lighting. You can have dramatically less ray tracing noise, flicker, mo, and fizzle when the camera is still or when it's moving. And at the same time, you can have higher fluidity of animation thanks to frame generations enhancement of the frame rate. And if you have something like an RTX 570, you can increase that divide further with a greater frame generation multiplier and a higher output resolution. I find this comparison kind of incredible considering how the input resolution here is technically lower. It just goes to show the power of competent machine-learned denoising that comes with DLSS ray reconstruction. And with that being said, I've actually reached the end of this video detailing the path tracing in Resident Evil Reququum and how it kind of bridges that gap between the ambitious pre-rendered graphics of the old games and the real-time rendering of the future. If you enjoyed this video, hit that like button, subscribe to the channel, ring the bell, support on Patreon, and as always, this is Alex bringing you farewell. >> Mr. Kennedy, we need to leave immediately.

Content sponsored by Nvidia. Horror-based games are all about the atmosphere - and with Resident Evil, Capcom knows it. In this video, Alex goes back to the origins of the Resident Evil aesthetic, and how its pre-rendered, static backgrounds delivered a unique sense of atmospheric horror that full 3D couldn't quite match... until now. We break down how the realism is ramped up and how the horror is enhanced with the arrival of path-traced graphics. 00:00:00 Introduction 00:00:43 How light and shadow shaped horror in Resident Evil's past 00:06:50 Path tracing direct lighting to maximise atmosphere 00:12:55 How path tracing improves reflections and indirect lighting 00:17:57 Getting a next-gen experience above consoles on PC