Resident Evil Village is getting ray tracing support

Well, here's a nice surprise. Resident Evil Village is getting ray tracing support, AMD announced this evening during their RX 6700 XT reveal event. They only showed off a brief clip of the game's ray tracing in action during their presentation, but from the looks of things we can expect to see beautifully ray traced reflections on its polished mansion floors and maybe some ray traced shadows as well.

The real question, though, is whether the hulking majesty of the game's main villain, the enormous Lady Dimitrescu, will also be treated to some lovely ray traced reflections. After all, big lady vampires aren't meant to have reflections, are they? And if it's not going to give us accurate 9ft 6in reflections of this woman who's taller than an actual ostrich, then really, what is even the point?

I've asked AMD for more details on this important conumdrum, but in the meantime, here's the clip in question so you can see for yourself just how shiny those ray traced mansion floors are going to be when the game launches on May 7th.

Again, there are scant details on what kind of PC you'll need to run Resident Evil Village with ray tracing switched on, but judging by AMD's own recommended specifications, it looks like it will be quite the beast in the old frame rate department. AMD are currently recommending their top of the line RX 6800 XT to play it with ray tracing enabled, along with a fairly basic Ryzen 5 1600 CPU, but for all we know that could be to play the game at 4K on max settings, as AMD don't mention anything else regarding resolution or the game's wider quality settings. As for playing the game without ray tracing switched on, AMD are currently recommending an RX 5700 XT graphics card, and the same Ryzen 5 1600 CPU.

It's also unclear whether Resident Evil Village's ray tracing support will be available on Nvidia RTX cards as well at the moment. I'd imagine it will, given that AMD's ray tracing gubbins is all based on open source technologies like Microsoft's DirectX Ray Tracing tech rather than special proprietary AMD stuff, but at the same time Nvidia have yet to make any kind of formal announcement about it so far.

Still, I'm excited at the prospect of more ray tracing games coming to PC - now let's just hope AMD get their rival DLSS tech, FidelityFX Super Resolution, ready in time for when Resident Evil Village comes out on May 7th, otherwise there'll be a lot more than just my stomach churning when Lady D starts chasing me through those super reflective hallways.