Resident Evil Village is creeping closer, with its May 7 release date now only two months away. In the lead up to Ethan Winters' return to the Resident Evil universe, more details about the game and its specifications are coming to light. There still remains a great deal of mystery surrounding the village in Resident Evil Village. What is becoming clear, however, is that the game is likely going to look great, with details on ray-tracing in the game emerging.
One of the biggest developments in graphics in recent years has been ray-tracing. With more PCs, and even next-gen consoles, powerful enough to handle the workload to make the dynamic lighting effect possible, ray-tracing offers a nice graphical enhancement to any game. Even Super Mario 64 can look amazing with ray-tracing in place, turning Wet-Dry World into a new experience for players.
Now, Resident Evil Village stands to benefit from a new partnership with AMD, bringing ray-tracing to the game with its FidelityFX suite of tools to optimize the effect on PC. This comes on the heels of AMD's announcement of its latest graphics card, the RX 6700 XT. The FidelityFX suite features specific enhancements like variable-rate shading, and might include its Super Resolution feature that works like Nvidia's DLSS, which is essentially machine learning that adjusts settings to optimize a game's performance.
AMD showed off a sample of what players can expect from the ray-tracing enhancements in Resident Evil Village, and the subtle differences in lighting create a more realistic environment. The short clip of Castle Dimitrescu shows how Resident Evil Village looks with the effect off, and then with it turned on. Capcom is quite sure that Resident Evil Village is the best survival horror game ever made, and from a graphic fidelity perspective, the company might be right. The ambient glow and reflections that ray-tracing creates brings video game lighting much closer to how humans perceive light in the real world.
The partnership with AMD and its FidelityFX tools likely means that the same support for Nvidia's DLSS won't be made available, which is unfortunate for folks with Nvidia graphics cards and setups. Regardless of PC setup, or what console the game is running on, there are high expectations for the game to deliver an engaging, terrifying experience. Capcom appears confident the game will meet fans' expectations, and has been actively promoting how much bigger Resident Evil Village is compared to RE7. Add ray-tracing to that mix, and there a number of reasons to be excited for RE Village.
Resident Evil Village will be available for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S on May 7th.