Resident Evil Village Ray Tracing Quality & Performance Impact of Different Settings | Page 3 of 4

One of the main issues with the ray-tracing implementation of Resident Evil Village is with respect to the coverage of the light sources. To save performance, developers divide a scene into segments using a world-space grid of sorts. Each grid cell or cluster has a limited range due to which the objects (geometry) contained within will only be affected by the light sources in that range, rather than the entire scene. This is somewhat similar to screen-space reflections where only the on-screen objects are rendered. However, in this case, off-screen objects are rendered as well, with only the light sources too far from the player being ignored.

With Resident Evil Village, however, this range for scene segments (clusters) is fairly small resulting in strange glitches wherein a room will be suddenly illuminated and then fade into darkness. In the above, this is caused by the presence of the lamp. When you move close to the lamp, the scene suddenly becomes brighter. In the absence of the lamp, the same isn’t be observed:

This can be seen in many locations of the game, especially while entering a well-lit interior either from a dark area or simply from outside:

Something similar can be observed in dark interiors with a lot of objects lying around. With ray-traced lighting, the occlusion of an area should remain the same no matter where you are standing. However, with Village, it isn’t always so. Take the following examples:

In the above example, you have the same room containing a bunch of cages (with ray-traced Global Illumination enabled). The lighting here is affected by your position in the room. The cages appear much darker if you’re standing closer to them, but they’re suddenly brighter if you look at them from the other end. Furthermore, this only happens with RTGI. When you’re using SSAO or CACAO, the lighting of the cages is the same from both ends:

I believe this is caused in the first case due to the camera (player) being too far from the light coming from the window and the door, as a result of which they aren’t considered.

Here’s the link to the 4K shots in case you’re interested.