We recently wrote about a very interesting Digital Foundry video in which Alex Battaglia explored the hidden path tracing mode in Dragon’s Domga 2. It was implemented directly by the developers, but most likely only for texture or material testing purposes and was never intended for real use. That’s why it doesn’t contain noise reduction, which causes the resulting image to be full of unpleasant grain; path tracing can take lighting to a whole other level anyway. And modders quickly discovered that Dragon’s Dogma 2 is far from the only Capcom game to feature PT.
In fact, Japanese developers have implemented path tracing in all games in the Resident Evil series, starting with the seventh part. Path tracing can be found in RE7, RE8, RE2, RE3 and RE4. Especially in the last named game, even though it’s the latest, path tracing can really work wonders because unlike everything else, it’s essentially just ray-traced reflections, which don’t look very good either. The rest of the games on the other hand have RT global illumination and ambient occlusion, Village has received improvements since release, as well as 2, 3 and 7 in the current gen update.
So, I started testing the fourth game and the results are really great, especially in terms of shadows, which are more detailed and really everywhere they should be (although this can make the game seem a little too dark in places). This is definitely proof that the next RE installment will actually need RT’s shadows.
I tried path tracing with settings of two reflections and four samples per pixel. Originally in 4K with FSR quality, but as it turned out, upscaling significantly worsened the path tracing noise. Results at native 4K with FXAA+TAA, or with DLSS quality upscaling via a mod where I left in-game TAA enabled, were, in contrast, surprisingly clean. Of course, the noise was still there and it definitely wasn’t ideal, but I expected worse results.
Another thing to note is that I intentionally turned off the hair strands for some screens, which makes the hair look much more realistic, but the lighting doesn’t affect it at all, so it looks like it doesn’t fit into the scene. In a normal game this is not so noticeable, but when tracing the path it is quite noticeable.
In theory, you can still play with path tracing in RE4, but you’ll probably have to lower the settings a bit or sacrifice other things, including resolution. In more demanding environments, I was running around 20fps on my RTX 4080 with DLSS quality up.
Unfortunately, I haven’t had any luck with other games. In the second and third games, the path tracing was much more noisy, and I basically had no way to go back to the original version (without restarting the game), so I can’t offer a fair comparison. Anyway, you can find some videos on YouTube. User JoHien then posted some very nice comparison screenshots on Reddit.
If you also want to try path tracing, just download the Nightly version of the RE Framework (upcaler version here) and drag the “dinput8.dll” file into your game folder. Once launched, you will see a menu where you need to go to the graphics settings and click on “Ray Tracing Settings”. Subsequently, I recommend setting Pure Path Tracing as main + ASVGF clone (before or after), as well as 2 reflections and 4 samples per pixel.
Source :Indian TV
