Recently, modders and tinkerers discovered a hidden experimental path tracing option in Capcom's RE Engine - which could instantly alter the look and feel of games like Dragon's Dogma 2 and the Resident Evil 4 Remake. Path Tracing or Full Ray Tracing replaces all conventional lighting, reflections, and shadow rendering with ray tracing, leading to a more realistic and often impressive look.
After checking it out in Resident Evil 4 and Dragon's Dogma 2, it's time to see how it looks and runs in Resident Evil Village, the most recent mainline entry in the popular survival horror franchise. And with DLSS 3.7, using the Quality Mode preset, runs in 4K, pushing 60 FPS and higher on a GeForce RTX 4080.
The footage and images arrive courtesy of the YouTube channel MxBenchmarkPC, which tested the game and engine's experimental Path Tracing.
One thing to note is that even though the lighting looks superior when Path Tracing is enabled, the most significant difference comes with Global Illumination and shadow detail; the overall image is noisier. The Path Tracing implementation here lacks a denoiser like NVIDIA's impressive Ray Reconstruction technology, so what we're looking at here could be even better with a few tweaks and official support.
Naturally, there's a massive performance hit when switching from the game's light real-time ray traced to path-traced visuals to roughly 60-65%. This is why you'd need a GPU like the GeForce RTX 4080 for path tracing to be playable in 4K and, even then, turn on additional performance-enhancing features like DLSS 3 Frame Generation.
As an experimental feature of its RE Engine, it will be interesting to see if Capcom goes as far as implementing path tracing in its PC releases. The tech works (outside of a few issues with noise and some oddities), and with games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Alan Wake II showcasing what Path Tracing can do - we'd love to throw Resident Evil into that mix officially.
