How to fix horrendous Resident Evil 7 performance on PC

[RejZoR]

For a long time, I couldn't figure out how to fix stupendously poor performance in this game, but not always or consistently, it was just randomly deciding to run at 15fps where in other segments it was running ultra smooth. Until I found a solution by setting Shadows Quality from Very High to High. And game took off like Harrier jet.

I don't get it why this is happening and why it's so random, but I can only conclude the rendering engine is bugged to the max. Capcom needs to fix this, until then, use High setting. The rest can be maxed out without any difference in performance... hope this will help if anyone is experiencing same problem...

 

[TheGuruStud]

It's maxed out for me at 1440 minus DoF and blur with no drops. But I quit b/c it thinks I can kill my possessed wife with bullets and no gun.

Actually, your problem is shadow cache, I just noticed that you have it enabled. The shadow setting isn't the problem. You're going way over VRAM with shadow cache enabled. 4GB or less has to disable it (see all the frame drops in reviews before they figured it out).

It's bugged just b/c the game doesn't disable by default on 4GB or less.

 

[RejZoR]

I'll try the cache thingie, but it's even more retarded if that's the culprit...

 

[Flogger23m]

Worked fine for me, as far as I can tell, 60 frame rates. But I do have a faster GPU (GTX 1070) which probably helped. BTW, Harrier isn't a good analogy. They have a tendency to crash and choke on their own exhaust.

 

[RejZoR]

They also take off vertically...

 

[kn00tcn]

fun fact, resident evil 5 (benchmark?) broke on ati on the 3rd segment dropping to 20s, i got to witness that myself... after more than one driver fix, you can still see it stutter for the first second (at least back on 4 series, or crossfire)

 

[bug]

@RejZoR I don't know how long have you been playing games, but shadow quality is the first thing that kills performance.

 

[RejZoR]

Not really. MSAA, Ambient Occlusion, Volumetric Lighting, Radiosity (or real-time reflections), and huge textures is what really kills performance.

Besides, shadows are the last thing you want to disable. Without shadows, games have no depth and they look totally washed out. They feel like supermodel without any eye liner and eye shadow. If you know what I mean. It just seems so dull and boring. It's why I'd sacrifice anything else before I'd sacrifice shadows. Besides, this is a horror game, having no shadows kinda ruins the whole atmosphere...

 

[bug]

Not really. MSAA, Ambient Occlusion, Volumetric Lighting, Radiosity (or real-time reflections), and huge textures is what really kills performance.

Besides, shadows are the last thing you want to disable. Without shadows, games have no depth and they look totally washed out. They feel like supermodel without any eye liner and eye shadow. If you know what I mean. It just seems so dull and boring. It's why I'd sacrifice anything else before I'd sacrifice shadows. Besides, this is a horror game, having no shadows kinda ruins the whole atmosphere...

Neah, shadows are still #1.
MSAA depends from game to game. Ambient occlusion and the other are also performance killers, but I don't rank them higher than shadows because they're more "specialized" (but that's just my opinion).

My checklist when I need to tune a game is:
1. shadows
2. other stuff lighting-related
3. AA

And no, I never disable any of the above. But unless you're playing an adventure/RPG, not using Very/Ultra High settings is barely noticeable. Who notices whether shadows are soft or not in a racing game?

And then there are those over-the-top settings like God rays of Hairworks that I simply consider gimmicks aimed at people that run Titans in SLI

 

[silentbogo]

Disabling dynamic shadows and shadow cache also helps.
Beat the campaign on GTX950 @ 1440p, Medium/High, no dynamic shadows, Shadow Cache off, Blur off, and dropped to FXAA. Still looks good, and stays within 40-60 FPS range.
Left the render scaling at 0.8.

I've tried 1080p all maxed out, but it looks like crap on 4K screen and shows FPS dips, like in your case. Can't wait for GTX1070 mini to arrive.

BTW, there are known issues with game's video memory usage.

Don't like to quote WCFTech, but they did a series of benchmarks to confirm it:
http://wccftech.com/resident-evil-7-biohazard-pc-performance/

Scroll all the way down to RX480 tests with Shadow Cache ON/OFF.

 

[rtwjunkie]

Neah, shadows are still #1.
MSAA depends from game to game. Ambient occlusion and the other are also performance killers, but I don't rank them higher than shadows because they're more "specialized" (but that's just my opinion).

My checklist when I need to tune a game is:
1. shadows
2. other stuff lighting-related
3. AA

And no, I never disable any of the above. But unless you're playing an adventure/RPG, not using Very/Ultra High settings is barely noticeable. Who notices whether shadows are soft or not in a racing game?

And then there are those over-the-top settings like God rays of Hairworks that I simply consider gimmicks aimed at people that run Titans in SLI

My list runs the same. The first thing I will sacrifice is shadows, because I'll be damned if I am sacrificing textures. Usually lowering shadows a bit is all I need to maintain my fps.

 

[bug]

My list runs the same. The first thing I will sacrifice is shadows, because I'll be damned if I am sacrificing textures. Usually lowering shadows a bit is all I need to maintain my fps.

I can't even remember when is the last time I had to lower texture quality. Textures either fit into memory or they don't. Very few titles have textures that don't fit most cards on the market (see the recent hi-res texture pack for Fallout4: HardOCP measured they fit within 6GB). Hell, I can't remember a title I had to use anything other than 16xAF for. Because, yeah, nothing beats crispness.

On the other hand, in many titles (but not all) the difference between very high and high textures is also minute. But as long as they fit in memory, there no performance to be gained by dialing them back.

 

[RejZoR]

I don't understand the purpose of Shadow Cache in the first place. Cache is meant to improve performance. But if I have it enabled, it works worse because it eats up ALL VRAM apparently. However, without it, the game runs at like super speed. On GTX 980 which is far from top of the line these days. So, what's the purpose? It doesn't seem to serve anything.

 

[silentbogo]

I don't understand the purpose of Shadow Cache in the first place. Cache is meant to improve performance. But if I have it enabled, it works worse because it eats up ALL VRAM apparently. However, without it, the game runs at like super speed. On GTX 980 which is far from top of the line these days. So, what's the purpose? It doesn't seem to serve anything.

It works the following way: instead of loading up memory bus and GPU to load/generate shadows at runtime, the game engine pre-loads them into VRAM.
It reduces the load on the GPU, but increases video memory usage.
Not 100% sure, but I think it was meant to improve the performance on mid-tier cards like GTX1060 6GB or RX470 8GB.

 

[RejZoR]

Improve it how when it flies like crazy anyway even on my card?

 

[bug]

Improve it how when it flies like crazy anyway even on my card?

By removing the bottleneck on the memory bus. Though in this case it looks like the developer made a crappy job and forgot to put the bottleneck in there, hence your results

 

[Raptor_i]

Shadow cache was the problem when I tried the demo nothing else fixed the bad performance .

 

[Ascalaphus]

Just fyi another performance tweak is texture quality. There is no visual difference between very high and all the way down to low. Only 'very low' has substantially worse textures. The difference in performance between the texture settings can be drastic though. Very High and High store all the games textures in your GPU vram to avoid pop in. That is the only difference. At higher resolutions if you are hitting your VRAM limit and the game is stuttering just reduce textures to medium or even low and you won't lose any visual quality. There will be a very rare texture pop in every now and then but that can be somewhat mitigated by having the game on an SSD.

Seriously there is no difference visually between very high textures and medium in RE7. LOL
Numerous articles online already about it.

 

[Derek12]

I played it on high settings and was smooth as butter thorough the game

 

[natr0n]

Build a better pc.

 

[NdMk2o1o]

Textures are downright awful looking on this game, have everything set to very high except for shadows which are high, getting a solid 60fps with vsync enabled but again just the textures look so crappy which is a shame and kinda ruins it a little bit as I had high hopes for this game, still gonna play through it as am a couple of hours in now.

 

[RejZoR]

They aren't that bad. What I really hate is retarded shimmering of those gory parts on the walls. I have negative LOD disabled and it's still doing it. I think it's the use of the wrong shader which causes this. It's just really bad.

 

[silentbogo]

They aren't that bad. What I really hate is retarded shimmering of those gory parts on the walls. I have negative LOD disabled and it's still doing it. I think it's the use of the wrong shader which causes this. It's just really bad.

Try to adjust render scaling. I had issues like that at 1080p with 0.8 scaling. Not only decals were distorted, but also blurry effects around the trees(first level outside) were all messed up (or anything that involves chromatic aberration).
At 1080p I ran a 1.0 scaling, but later switched to 1440p w/ 0.8 scaling.

extures are downright awful looking on this game, have everything set to very high except for shadows which are high, getting a solid 60fps with vsync enabled but again just the textures look so crappy which is a shame and kinda ruins it a little bit as I had high hopes for this game, still gonna play through it as am a couple of hours in now.

Textures looked OK to me. It's buggy postprocessing that makes it look worse than it is.
I was actually surprised how good were the textures, and how well my GTX950 handled it w/ only 2GB of VRAM.

 

[RejZoR]

The render scale is fine. I's the way wet shaders are rendered and that thing shimmers around like insane. I'm also using just SMAA, because it doesn't blurry the image as much as everything else. FXAA and/or TAA would fix that, but I don't want blurry image.

 

[INSTG8R]

Not sure why you're having issues. Only thing I that turned off was motion blur everything else is maxed and I had to check but shadow cache is on too. Never seen it drop below 90fps, averages about 114fps most of the time.

Edit: That shimmer your talking about I've noticed that but it's been on characters.