During the announcement of the Radeon RX 6700 XT, AMD announced its collaboration with Capcom to implement ray-tracing and its suite of FidelityFX effects, most notably ambient occlusion in Resident Evil Village. Earlier, it was assumed that all the RX 6000 series graphics cards would support ray-tracing in the game, but as per AMD’s official website that’s not the case:
Without ray-tracing, a Ryzen 5 1600 and a Radeon RX 5700 are sufficient to run the game with high to ultra settings at 1080p/1440p. It’s unclear whether we’re looking at a 30 or 60 FPS target, but I’d reckon the latter as the RE engine is highly optimized. For ray-tracing, however, the GPU requirement goes all the way up to the higher-end RX 6800 XT. The CPU requirement stays the same, indicating that this game is going to be quite intensive on the GPU.
As explained earlier, there are two ray-traced effects noticeable right off the bat: RTGI (ray-traced global illumination) and ray-traced reflections. This will be the first major AMD-partner game to support ray-traced reflections which again makes it very possible that Super Resolution will be out by then, considering how performance-intensive they are. However, if that’s not the case, you’ll definitely need a 6800 XT to run the game with ray-tracing even at 1440p.
AMD’s custom AO algorithm, namely Combined Adaptive Compute Ambient Occlusion (CACAO) (basically the counter to HBAO+) is also likely at work here, as evident from the much more detailed shadows in the right image.
It’s very likely that NVIDIA’s RTX GPUs won’t support ray-tracing at the time of launch, and will be patched in later on. Either way, I expect the Ampere parts to outperform Big Navi due to the fully dedicated ray-tracing pipeline. As far as DLSS is concerned, there’s a very slim chance of that showing up.
Resident Evil Village will launch on the 7th of May on PC, PS5, PS4, Xbox One, One X and Series X|S. It’ll leverage an upgraded version of the same RE engine used in the publisher’s recent titles.
