Resident Evil: Requiem is the first in the horror franchise to be released solely for current-generation consoles, but what really makes it special is the engine that runs it. The RE Engine was built initially for Resident Evil 7, and Capcom has since used it to power everything from Monster Hunter: Wilds to Exoprimal – remember that one?
But while the engine has had issues in open-world games, it’s still incredible for the franchise it was created for. As a result, Resident Evil Requiem looks exquisite on the PS5, and runs smoothly no matter which version of the platform you’re using.
I was particularly interested to see how the first Resident Evil game designed first and foremost for the current generation of consoles would perform across all its platforms, but I only got pre-release code for PS5 and PC. So while I’ll be looking at the Xbox Series X and Nintendo Switch 2 after launch, I went ahead and dove into the PS5 and PC versions to see how they compare.
The Display Modes
While it’s become the norm for console games to have multiple display modes that prioritize quality or frame rate, the base PS5 only has one mode. That will get you a 4K image upscaled from roughly 1080p, but running at an incredibly stable 60 fps. Capcom probably could have scaled the game down a bit more to add a high frame rate mode to the basic PS5, but it really does strike a nice balance between resolution and performance.
The PS5 Pro is a little more flexible. There are two display modes here, revolving entirely around ray tracing, or the lack thereof. Without ray tracing, the PS5 Pro looks very similar to the base PS5 version of the game, but it does appear to be upscaling from a higher resolution – 1300p from my count.
Instead of changing too much about the visual quality, the ‘RT off’ mode instead focuses on delivering a high frame rate, targeting up to 120 fps – though it didn’t quite reach that mark in my testing.
The ray tracing preset takes the place of a “prefer quality” type of preset in Resident Evil Requiem on the PS5 Pro. The underlying quality settings and resolution don’t seem to change too much here, but ray tracing is turned on, which enhances the lighting, reflections and shadows. And while early ray tracing modes on the PS5 dropped performance down to 30 fps, Resident Evil Requiem still targets 60 fps with the fancy lighting enabled.
What’s particularly impressive about this mode, though, is how close it looks to the PC version with ray tracing set to “high”. While a gaming PC with a high-end GPU will get better performance with these quality settings, it’s still awesome that a console can deliver this level of visual fidelity while still hitting a solid 60 fps.
Performance
More than anything, it looks like Resident Evil Requiem is continuing the trend of 60 fps gaming being the floor. Even on the base PS5, the game doesn’t drop below 60, and the PS5 Pro takes those quality settings and pushes for even higher performance.
With the non-ray tracing preset on PS5 Pro, Capcom is targeting high-refresh displays, with performance hovering between 99 and 110 fps during the opening scene here. There are some quality differences between this version and what’s running on the base PS5, but they’re extremely minor, and mostly come down to the slightly lower resolution.
The minor differences in presentation here make it even more impressive that Capcom was able to raise the frame rate by so much. In the worst case scenario, where the PS5 Pro drops under 100 fps, it’s still getting around a 40% boost to frame rate.
Even on the base PS5, the game doesn’t drop below 60 fps.The ray tracing preset drops the frame rate back down to 60, but it looks much better, especially in darker scenes. You can debate all day long whether or not 60 fps is enough, but with how important lighting is in Requiem, having that extra fidelity is totally worth the tradeoff – especially if you don’t have a display that can actually output a higher frame rate.
On PC I tested the game with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080, with ray tracing set to high, along with graphics quality and lighting quality also set to the high preset. This isn’t fully maxed out, but with DLSS set to ‘Performance’ it looks remarkably similar to the PS5 Pro’s ray tracing preset.
With the RTX 5080, which is admittedly more expensive than the PS5 Pro by itself, Requiem runs at around 110-120 fps at 4K, without frame generation. However, there are some scenes with a lot of NPCs, like this street scene that we’re using for testing, where performance can drop down to around 95-100 fps, but that’s still more than enough.
Requiem also supports path tracing on PC, which looks incredible, but will absolutely gut your performance. In the same scene, the frame rate dropped down to 55 fps. That’s not great, but that tends to happen when you take ray tracing and turn it up to 11. I was also able to turn on frame generation, which saw the frame rate shoot all the way up to around 200 fps – more than my capture card can actually capture. Frame generation does add extra latency, but it wasn’t enough to actually be noticeable when playing the game.
Image Quality
No matter how you’re playing Resident Evil Requiem, it looks incredible, even when it’s showing you pretty gnarly scenes.
Right at the beginning of the game, after you get out of some cinematics, you’ll find yourself on a city street. What’s surprising is that, at least on PC, this was one of the most demanding sections of the game that I’ve played through so far, likely due to the NPCs walking along the street, on top of the rain creating a ton of reflective surfaces.
However, due to the somewhat random assortment of NPCs that appear here, it’s easiest to look at this cinematic that triggers once Grace gets to a crime scene. Just pausing at the beginning of the scene and zooming in on her jacket, you can tell the difference in resolution between the base PS5 and PS5 Pro – it’s subtle, but it’s there.
What’s less subtle, though, is the differences ray tracing makes to the same scene. Swapping to this mode on the PS5 Pro, and the button is a little reflective, which gives it much more depth. Then, zooming out a bit, you can see a lot more depth and shadow in Grace’s hair. Then, if you zoom in behind her, you can see that on the ray tracing mode, the cop car in the scene projects its emergency light on the subway’s support beam – where it just looks like flat metal on the base PS5.
This scene also illustrates how close the PS5 Pro is to the PC version when it comes to image quality. The shadows are a bit more pronounced on the PC version, which gives some more depth to Grace’s character model, but the differences are minor.
Fast forward a little bit, though, and you can see one of the biggest differences between ray tracing and path tracing. Once the cop lifts the tarp to let Grace into the crime scene, most versions of the game show the alley behind it as dark, losing a lot of detail. Turn on path tracing, though, and the light naturally illuminates what’s on the other side of the tarp. Again, a pretty minor detail in the grand scheme of things, but these things add up over time.
Ray tracing really shines in Requiem’s darker scenes with a lot of reflective surfaces. Luckily, you also spend much of the first hour of the game in a dark, rainy city. A little later on, you gain control of Leon, where there’s a zombie outbreak of sorts in the city.
In this scene there’s virtually no difference between the PS5 and the PS5 Pro beyond frame rate, so I’m just going to focus on the two performance modes on the PS5 Pro. Without ray tracing, the scene looks alright, but a lot of the reflections in the various puddles are a bit muddy, with vague shapes of light showing up. That’s a side-effect of using screen space reflections, which are a lot less precise than ray tracing.
With RT enabled, though, you can make out the shapes of the street lights in the puddles, and Leon’s leather jacket also reflects light, which makes it look like, well, a leather jacket.
The PC version, of course, takes it to another level. You can zoom in on the hotel sign here, and the details on the hotel wall are much more clear, thanks to improved global illumination. That’s something that you’d have to zoom in a bunch to actually see, but it’s a nice detail regardless.
Then, if you enable path tracing, the reflections are especially enhanced here. Just look at this van, with regular old ray tracing, you can make out some small reflections of lights. But with path tracing, you can see the full reflection of the street signal behind it, while also making the rear view window actually look like a transparent glass panel. It looks incredible.
The care center also shows huge gaps between the ray traced and the non-ray traced versions of the game. When you get to this spooky looking hallway, with its flickering lights, look at how the lighting behaves. With the non-RT mode, the light cuts off almost like it hits a hard boundary. However, with ray tracing, the ray traced global illumination takes the light from the lamp at the end of the corridor and makes it extend much more naturally down the hallway, tapering off the further away it gets from the source.
You can also see along the edges, where the pictures on the wall are in complete darkness just a few feet into the hallway, where the light bounces more naturally when ray tracing is enabled. It’s a small touch, but it really does do a lot to make the game a bit more atmospheric.
Though, to be fair, even without ray tracing, I was much more worried about what was lurking around the next corner than I was about slightly unrealistic lighting.
At the end of the day, the same age-old advice applies to Resident Evil Requiem. If you have a high refresh display and you like the extra visual smoothness that comes from a high frame rate, turn ray tracing off if you have a PS5 Pro. The game looks great regardless, and going up to 100-ish fps will make a huge difference when you’re panicking.
But if you don’t have a high-refresh display, or if you just like having your games look as good as possible, go ahead and turn ray tracing on. Yeah, you’ll take a hit to performance, but it still gets a solid 60 fps on PS5 Pro and it looks incredible.
Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra
Connexion
