Conclusion

Resident Evil 4 is Capcom's 2023 release for the legendary action-horror series. The original came out in 2005, 18 years ago—today you get to replay it with greatly improved tech and visuals. While the story is identical, the actual gameplay has been modernized in several ways. For example, there's now crafting and parrying, you can move while shooting, and an escort quest is less annoying to complete. In terms of gameplay the newest Resident Evil is outstanding, comparable to Resident Evil Village. While you start out as weak and feeble agent, throughout the game you'll acquire significant upgrades, which makes slaying enemies much easier. The game is currently sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam, with 97% of the 23,000 reviews positive—very impressive. If you liked Resident Evil Village, definitely check out Resident Evil 4.

In terms of tech, the same in-house RE Engine is used as in RE: Village, with only minor improvements. Actually, there's even a downgrade: ray tracing used to be lighting and reflections, now it's only for reflections, which you very rarely encounter in the game. A shame, even more so, considering this is an AMD sponsored title. What's also missing is support for NVIDIA DLSS, but you get AMD FSR 1 and FSR 2.

Check out our screenshots on page two, the graphics quality is outstanding. Especially geometry and texture details on characters are amazing, which helps add realism to the NPCs and enemies. Nearly all outdoor environments are richly modeled, with tons of vegetation and debris. The map designers have also added plenty of objects that make the zones more interesting to look at. Indoor scenes are different however, here you get a fairly boring look featuring mostly-flat floors, with decoration that looks like it could be from a much older title. The textures are still excellent though.

What I really like is that there's an extensive settings menu that lets you fine-tune most aspects of the game. During gaming, the field of view felt a bit too narrow to me. Considering that this is a tense horror game, I can understand why the game devs decided to pick a narrow FOV—still, at least there is a setting to adjust it, although the range could be a bit bigger.

In terms of hardware requirements, Resident Evil 4 Remake is demanding, but not as crazy as other titles this year. To achieve 60 FPS at highest settings in 1080p Full HD, without ray tracing, a GeForce RTX 3060 or Radeon RX 6600 XT is sufficient—very nice! Even the aging Radeon RX 5700 XT achieves 78 FPS at Full HD. If you're gaming on 1440p, then 60 FPS is in reach for RX 6700 XT, GeForce RTX 2080 Ti or RTX 3070. Hitting 60 FPS at 4K doesn't require the big guns either, a RTX 3080 or RX 6800 XT will give you smooth gameplay at that resolution. Generally speaking, AMD Radeon cards do a little bit better in performance than equivalent tier NVIDIA GeForce GPUs, but the differences are fairly small.

Turning on ray tracing comes with a surprisingly small performance hit, probably because there's only a minimal ray tracing implementation that pretty much makes no difference anyway. A tiny drop from 94.7 FPS to 93.4 FPS (RTX 4080 4K) is still unexpected, especially when the exact same settings and test scene result in a bigger drop on other cards (RTX 4090: 127.8 -> 118.2 FPS, RX 7900 XTX: 103.2 FPS -> 97.4 FPS). No idea what's happening here.

Another result worth pointing out is that cards with 8 GB VRAM will be unable to run ray tracing at all, and simply crash during loading. This shouldn't happen. DirectX is designed to use main memory when the GPU's memory runs out—at much lower performance of course, but without crashing. Given the huge number of settings options it's easy to reduce VRAM usage by dialing down textures or something else, to free up memory for ray tracing, if you really must have it. In my opinion it's not worth it in Resident Evil 4. VRAM usage is pretty high across the board, with even 1600x900 allocating 9.1 GB (11 GB with ray tracing).

Overall, Resident Evil 4 is an excellent port that runs very well, delivering good graphics and more importantly, outstanding gameplay.