The full release of the Resident Evil 4 remake has landed on PC, bringing nearly the exact same performance and graphical characteristics as the demo – for good and for ill. That means you can expect better-than-console performance and image quality, but there are still improvements for Capcom to make – and serious bugs you’ll want to avoid. With that in mind, we’ll focus our analysis on the optimised settings that’ll help you get the most out of the game.
Let’s start with the most important setting first: image upscaling. This is key as the game’s temporal anti-aliasing (TAA) unfortunately doesn’t produce great results, while an enforced sharpening filter tends to degrade the image further. Even with a static camera, you’ll notice that vegetation crawls, edges shimmer incessantly and the whole scene has a posterised look.
Normally we’d look to the likes of DLSS, XeSS or FSR2 to solve these problems, but while FSR2 is available it doesn’t look right. The presentation with FSR2 enabled is overly soft, shimmery and some areas are visibly aliased. We’d only really recommend it at 4K, where the base resolution is sufficient to produce a reasonable result. FSR1 is available too, but it’s even worse, as it compounds the image quality issues by sharpening and upscaling an already oversharpened and poorly aliased image.
This isn’t the first Capcom game to face these sorts of aliasing and over-sharpening issues on PC, and so there is a community solution to the problem. Using the brilliant REFramework mod developed by praydog, you can inject DLSS or XeSS to improve the visuals substantially. There are still some issues here common to modded-in upscalers, such as occasional jittering or smearing of HUD elements or odd-looking specular highlights, but it still puts the built-in upscaling options to shame. On the one hand, it’s great that this option exists for enterprising users, but it’s a real shame that Capcom’s own developers couldn’t implement an upscaler of sufficient quality themselves.
In general, I’d suggest using native resolution rendering or using the REFramework mod; for my own testing I switched from native 1440p to 4K DLSS Performance and found both performance and image quality improved markedly.
Normally, optimised settings are about getting a good balance between performance and fidelity, but with Resident Evil 4 trying to avoid crashes is also key. We’ve seen plenty of reports of the game crashing due to exceeding VRAM limits, and we’ve successfully recreated the issue as well by playing the game with high 2GB textures at 1440p with high ray tracing and maxed settings elsewhere, the game crashed within a few seconds of starting the campaign. This probably goes without saying, but we’d generally expect games to run more slowly when they exceed VRAM limits, as slower system memory is used instead, so outright crashes make for a pretty poor user experience.