On the night of Thursday to Friday, almost immediately after the end of the Capcom Spotlight event, a demo version of the expected Resident Evil 4 remake called “Chainsaw Demo” was released, and in it you can see the very beginning of the whole game Leon’s arrival in the village. I’ve tried the demo on all three major platforms (PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X), so I’m providing, at least through text and screenshots, a comparison between the individual versions, both in terms of graphics and frame rates.
On both consoles, you can expect two main modes – “Resolution” and “Frame Rate”, I think the names speak for themselves. At the same time, you can turn ray tracing on or off for each mode, bringing the total number of modes to 4.
Frame rate + RT
Since I really prefer smooth frame rates over resolution, I decided to try the aptly named mode first. While the game looks very nice on the Xbox, I was struck by the so-called flickering on the PlayStation, which has been a problem for a long time, for example, in Horizon Forbidden West (it is hard to see in the screenshots, the flickering is visible mainly in motion). Given the subsequent comparison with the PC version and playing with the FSR settings, I concluded that this is most likely caused by this upscaling technology, which in short still does not live up to such qualities as Nvidia’s DLSS. It’s definitely survivable, but it’s not ideal and distracting. At the same time, you can see that the Xbox version has better shadows and a slightly higher resolution, this applies to almost all modes.
In terms of performance, the game holds a near stable 60 FPS indoors, but worse outdoors, so as a test location I chose the big fight with the villagers at the end of the demo, which is by far the most demanding part of the game. Hardware. On the PS5 version, you can expect frame rates of 50 to 60 fps, very rarely a little less. Variable refresh rate will definitely help here if you have a display device with an HDMI 2.1 port.
The same applies to the Xbox version, but FreeSync support is enough for you. VRR is also very useful here, performance is basically similar to that of the PlayStation, although the PS5 version could be a bit more stable.
Frame frequency
Subsequently, I tried performance mode without ray tracing. Thanks to RT, the game has improved lighting and reflections, but you can definitely do without this and still look very beautiful. That is, except for the flickering that is in the PS5 version.
On the other hand, the frame rate on the PlayStation is quite stable and is the smoothest of all the modes on the new consoles. But, unfortunately, even this mode is not completely stable and the frame rate can drop.
It’s even worse on Xbox. While the PS5 version tries to maintain a steady 60fps at least most of the time, the Xbox version fluctuates almost constantly, even when the framerate is at fifty.
Resolution + RT
Now it’s the turn of the lowest quality mode, which offers high resolution and ray tracing. You can see a visual comparison below. However, I would like to point out that the flickering on the PS5 persists even here, although it is no longer as pronounced as it is in frame rate mode.
As you might expect, the performance is not very good. Framerates on the PS5 in more demanding playthroughs are at best just over 50 FPS, but often below that limit, and also dropping below 40s.
It’s even worse on Xbox. The frame rate stays around 45 FPS at its best and drops below 40 at its worst.
Permission
The last mod is high-res without RT, which could be a good choice, but again it messes with flickering on PS5 and performance on Xbox.
On the PlayStation 5, you can expect a frame rate of around 50fps, a little higher at best, a little lower at worst.
The Xbox also has a slightly worse frame rate here, almost not much different from the ray tracing mode, which is rather strange. The frame rate mostly stayed around 45 FPS.
PlayStation 4 (backwards compatible)
Resident Evil 4 is a bit of a weird game as it’s not coming to Xbox One but it’s coming to PlayStation 4. I don’t have a PS4 console, but at least I tried the “worst” version via PS5 backwards compatibility to see how noticeable the visual difference is . And I must say that it is. The game here again offers two modes (without the RT option): resolution and frame rate. The first one looks quite normal so far, but even there the detail is lower, and some shadows are completely absent. The resolution of the second mode is so low that the image is really very blurry and the whole game does not look very nice.
I tried the PS4 version mainly because I wanted to see if it could hit a solid 60fps on the PS5. And the answer is only partially. The resolution mode is definitely more stable than all the native modes on the PS5, but the frame rate still drops occasionally.
So I thought the game should run smoothly in the ugly frame rate mode, but even here I experienced occasional FPS drops. This made me think that the game, at least in some moments, is limited by the processor, not the graphics chip. This is quite problematic, because neither reducing the graphics nor using FSR will help here. I wonder if the developers will be able to fix these problems before the release.
PC
Finally, we have the PC version, which definitely looks the best on max settings. In addition, the possibilities are really rich and you can install any little thing, which is not a standard and Capcom deserves credit for this. But even the PC version wasn’t without problems, on my setup with an Intel Core i5-13600K processor, RTX 3070 graphics card and 32GB DDR5 RAM, I had almost constant crashes after I changed something in the settings, which is very frustrating, and I’m far from the only one who has encountered such problems.
Another downside is the old familiar stuttering that accompanies virtually every PC game today. I noticed crashes mainly at the beginning, but they were quite large, one extreme lasted a few seconds. Since there were significantly fewer stutters on the second pass, this could mean it was again a shader compilation stutter, which Capcom could resolve by compiling the shaders when the game was launched rather than directly during the game.
Otherwise, even on my RTX 3070, I could play 4K when I turned on FSR 2 quality. Frame rates, at least initially, fluctuated between 50 and 60 fps. The problem started in the second part of the demo, where, as if I suddenly launched a completely different game, the frame rate dropped to about 30 frames per second and did not rise again.
realistic hair
At the very end, I saved an item that you can find in the settings not only on PC, but also on new consoles. Visually, it is perhaps the most interesting, because we are talking about “Hair Strands”, literally about strands of hair. Hair doesn’t look very pretty in games using the RE Engine, but when you turn on this new feature, it’s completely different and looks very realistic in my opinion. In any case, judge for yourself, you will find a comparison below, and screenshots from the PC version.
Some players report that this setting significantly reduces performance, but I personally tested it on both PC and consoles and saw little to no difference in performance. So if, like me, you don’t have performance issues, be sure to enable Hair Strands, as it’s a huge visual leap forward, even if it’s “just” hair.
What do you think about the demo, did you like it in terms of content and technical aspects?
Resident Evil 4 Remake releases March 24 for PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.
Source :Indian TV
