We recently wrote about a very interesting Digital Foundry video in which Alex Battaglia explored the hidden path tracing mode in Dragon’s Domga 2. It was implemented directly by the developers, but very likely only for texture or material checking purposes, never intended for real use. This is also why it does not contain denoising, due to which the resulting image is full of unpleasant grain, path tracing can, in any case, raise lighting to a completely different level. And modders quickly discovered that Dragon’s Dogma 2 is far from the only Capcom title to feature PT.
In fact, Japanese developers implemented path tracing in all games from the Resident Evil series starting with the seventh installment. Path Tracing can be found in RE7, RE8, RE2, RE3 and RE4. Especially in the last named game, even though it’s the latest, path tracing can really do wonders, because unlike all other parts, it’s basically just ray tracing reflections, which also don’t look very good. The rest of the games, on the other hand, have RT global lighting and ambient occlusion, Village has received improvements since release and 2, 3 and 7 in the current-gen update.
So I started testing the fourth part and the results are really great, especially in terms of shadows, which are more detailed and really everywhere they should be (although the game can seem a bit too dark in places because of this). It’s definitely proof that the next part of RE would really need RT shadows.
I tried Path Tracing on a setting with 2 reflections and 4 samples per pixel. Originally in 4K with FSR Quality, but as it turned out, the upscaling significantly worsened the path tracing noise. The results with native 4K with FXAA+TAA or with DLSS Quality upscaling through the modification, where I left in-game TAA turned on, were, on the contrary, surprisingly clean. Sure, the noise was still there and it certainly wasn’t ideal, but I expected worse results.
I would also like to point out that I deliberately turned off hair strands for some screens, which make the hair much more realistic, but the lighting does not affect it at all, so it looks as if it does not fit into the scene. This is not so visible in a normal game, but with path tracing it is quite noticeable.
Purely in theory, anyway, RE4 can be played with path tracing, but it would probably be necessary to lower its settings a bit or sacrifice other things, including resolution. In more demanding locations, I was moving around 20 FPS on my RTX 4080 with DLSS Quality upscale.
Unfortunately, I haven’t had such luck with the other titles. In the second and third part, the path tracing caused much more noise, and mainly I was not able to switch back to the original version (without restarting the game), so I cannot offer a proper comparison. Anyway, you can find some videos on YouTube. User JoHien then posted some very nice comparison screenshots on Reddit.
If you want to try path tracing as well, just download the Nightly version of the RE Framework (version with upcaler here) and drag the “dinput8.dll” file into the game folder. After launch you will see a menu where you have to go to Graphics settings and click on “Ray Tracing Tweaks”. Subsequently, I recommend setting Pure Path Tracing as main + ASVGF clone (pre or post), along with 2 reflections and 4 samples per pixel.
