The new Resident Evil 4 is out now, and while you can check out our Wccftech’s review of the PS5 version of the game, how does it fare on PC? While the RE-Engine-powered remake doesn’t have the severe issues a lot of recent Unreal Engine PC ports have had, according to an analysis from the folks at Digital Foundry, Capcom’s work on the platform is far from flawless. Issues with image quality, ray tracing, and crashing still make the RE4 PC experience less-than-ideal at times. If you’ve got around 20 minutes to spare, you can check out the full Digital Foundry video below, or scroll on down for the highlights.
While the new Resident Evil 4 is a good-looking game overall, the PC version has some issues with image quality, as temporal anti-aliasing is not well-implemented and Capcom seems to have applied an overbearing sharpening filter to the game that you can’t tweak. This leads to a lot of jagged, shimmery edges and somewhat ugly-looking grass and foliage. RE4 supports FSR 1 and 2, but the results still aren’t great. Digital Foundry actually finds that mods that add DLSS to the game (Capcom does not support NVIDIA’s upscaling tech natively) actually provide a better result than the officially-implemented FSR.
Another issue with the PC version of Resident Evil 4 is crashing, which seems to be tied to VRAM usage, with 8 GB and 10 GB graphics cards struggling. Thankfully, you can save yourself some VRAM headspace by turning off ray tracing as the quality of reflections aren’t that high, which is particularly noticeable when combined with the PC version of RE4’s anti-aliasing and sharpening issues. Screen-space reflections aren’t great either. Also, as I’ve recommended before, go ahead and turn off those fancy hair strands – they look goofy and definitely aren’t worth it if they’re going to contribute to your game crashing. If you do want to keep ray tracing, you’ll want to turn down texture quality and shadows in order to keep the crashes at bay.
Overall, Resident Evil 4 is still very playable on PC as performance isn’t an issue, but it does seem like Capcom could have treated the port with a bit more care. Again, if you’d like some general thoughts on the Resident Evil 4 remake, you can check out my full review.
Resident Evil 4 is available now on PC, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, and PS5.
