The nightmare of Resident Evil 4 Remake is also about to land on PC and Steam Deck: this is how the restored version of the Capcom icon is doing.
Four years after the acclaimed remake of the second chapter (here the review of Resident Evil 2) and now two years after the debut of Resident Evil Village, our worst nightmares come back to visit us in a new and ambitious makeover, this time from Leon’s adventure in a remote area of ​​Spain.
Resident Evil 4 was a breaking point, the watershed between the classic iterations and the subsequent titles of the series, yet Capcom has managed to modernize it in the best way, as we told you in our review of Resident Evil 4. But how does it behave the PC version? We have tried it thoroughly and we are ready to tell you.
A respectful tribute
In paying homage to the original experience, giving players back all of its most iconic sections in a modernized form, the Japanese software house has not failed to give new life to the terrifying clashes of Leon and to make improvements also regarding the characters and the story.
The result, in purely playful and narrative terms, is a title that manages to re-propose and emphasize the source material with dignity, but courageously departing from it when it is appropriate to do so. Relatively less pressing but no less adrenaline-pumping than the original, Resident Evil 4 Remake invites us to retrace our path and make more reasoned choices, without however denying us the joy of a generous arsenal with which to eliminate the Ganados (it must be said, however, that instant uploads they do not contribute to making our choices more painful). The crowning achievement of the excellent work of the artistic team is also the technical front, on which we were also able to focus on PC.
Real-time horror
We played Resident Evil 4 Remake on a configuration designed for 4K, consisting of a Ryzen 7 7700X flanked by 32GB of DDR5-5200 RAM and an RTX 3080. With these specs, we were able to squeeze the RE Engine to the maxdespite the exaggerated amount of items to consult and modify in the settings in order to aim for the most advanced graphic configuration possible.
Many of the options present will have a minimal impact on performance and on the visual front; others, on the other hand, could also bring particularly high-end hardware to its knees. Fortunately, the real-time calculation system helps us showing in a series of graphs how much and how a specific aspect will affect performance, as well as providing us with a very useful video memory saturation counter, which will be literally devoured by the quality of the textures. There is also a Medium ray tracing, whose intervention is limited to reflections only, supported by a more traditional management of the lights. Without making any compromises of any kind, we ran the title without ray tracing with encouraging results, with no frame-rate drops even in 4K (we were able to easily produce an average of 60 frames per second). This is already a very good goal, which can be further improved thanks to the presence of Fidelity FX Super Resolution 2the impact of which, however, is only marginal.
As you move to lower resolutions, the contribution of FSR 2 dwindles more and more, going to zero in FullHD, where the title remains around 100 fps both with and without temporal upscaler. Difficult to recommend its use under these conditionsabove all by virtue of a conspicuous drop in sharpness at lower resolutions and especially at 1080p, in which the deterioration of the image even with quality presets is clearly evident.
Among the problems encountered there is a strong instability that leads to frequent game crashes in case you use Ray Tracing. However, these uncertainties will likely be mitigated and improved over time, especially with Day One updates and beyond. The material we came into contact with in preview, net of some forced closures and the questionable contribution of FSR, resulted particularly optimizedwith a satisfying experience also on the visual front.
A portable nightmare
Moving on to Valve’s small portable console, on which the title is currently it hasn’t been verified yet, we were still able to record some very good gaming sessions. Steam Deck hasn’t yet been optimized properly for the new Resident Evil 4 but evidently that’s not a problem, as we managed to bring home some rock solid 40fps action thanks to the system frame cap.
By unlocking the refresh rate at low game quality, limiting effects and reflections, however, the performance of the machine allows you to travel on an average of 52 frames per second. Curiously, on the portable console FidelityFX Super Resolution 2 proved instrumental both to give greater stability to the count of frames, and to improve autonomy.
Unfortunately, as for other titles, also in this case the sharpness will not make you scream at the miracle, thanks to an already limited native resolution and which is further tested by the upscalers, which by their nature reduce the material number of rendered pixels. For this intrinsic limitation, the machine allows itself to be forgiven thanks to outstanding overall stabilitywhich manages to leave you speechless given the complexity of the settings.
Returning to autonomy, in no case can you reach more than two and a half hours of use. These numbers can be obtained precisely by blocking the refresh rate at 40 fps, while going down to 30 it is possible to gain another handful of minutes at the expense of general fluidity and game latency. Finally, with the framerate unlocked, it is not possible to exceed an hour and twenty, but in no case does the machine heat up more than necessary, an unequivocal sign of what we said just before: the optimization work done by Capcom it turned out to be punctual and flawless on all counts.
