Digital Foundry Direct: RE Village, FPS Boost & Ray Tracing

Resident Evil Village Performance

This week deep-dives into the technical performance of Resident Evil Village across various platforms.

• Console Performance: The game generally offers a polished, high-frame-rate experience, though performance can be volatile in specific high-load scenes like the village or lake areas.
• Ray Tracing Analysis: The ray tracing implementation is lightweight, favoring performance over visual perfection. While it adds subtle improvements to foliage shadowing and local Global Illumination, it can feel underwhelming in reflective surfaces, which suffer from aliasing and a visible pixel structure.
• PC Port Concerns: The PC version suffers from scalability issues, failing to fully utilize high-end hardware. There are also concerns regarding the lack of a proper temporal anti-aliasing component, leading to more aliasing than expected, and bizarre UI/menu navigation that ignores standard keyboard inputs.

Microsoft's FPS Boost Strategy

Microsoft has expanded its FPS Boost program to cover nearly 100 titles.

• The team discusses the trade-offs between higher frame rates and potential resolution reductions when forcing legacy titles into different rendering modes.
• Notable successes like Shadow of the Tomb Raider demonstrate that doubling the frame rate can transform older titles into experiences that feel like current-gen ports.
• The panel expresses caution, as some legacy titles may see unintentional downgrades if the system forces a non-enhanced base version to increase frames.

The Legal Landscape: Epic vs. Apple

The discussion touches upon the ongoing legal battle between Epic and Apple, which has inadvertently revealed significant industry intelligence.

"The dirty laundry of the industry is being paraded out for everybody to look at."

• The transparency regarding Sony's cross-play fees and the massive sums paid for platform exclusivity on the Epic Games Store has provided a rare, behind-the-scenes look at how major corporations handle competition and market positioning.

Additional Topics

Returnal

Despite its technical polish, the game's lack of a save and quit feature in a roguelike structure is criticized, alongside concerns regarding crash rates and the reliability of rest mode.

Future of Ray Tracing

The panel reflects on whether ray tracing is truly the future. They argue that despite current performance hurdles and the proprietary nature of features like DLSS, the technology is a necessary evolution, comparable to the industry's shift from 2D to 3D in the 90s.