Resident Evil Village's PC requirements aren't as scary as you might think
Ray tracing will also be available on Nvidia GPUs, too
Capcom unveiled the PC requirements for their upcoming horror fest Resident Evil Village today, and the good news is that you won't need a graphics card the size of its 9ft 6in villain Lady Dimitrescu in order to run it. Posted to Steam earlier today, Resident Evil Village's PC requirements also confirm that its previously announced ray tracing support for AMD GPUs will be available on Nvidia RTX cards as well, but we'll have to wait a little longer for some more realistic performance targets, as Capcom have currently only revealed what it will take to run the game at 4K with ray tracing switched on (even if they do handily provide both 45fps and 60fps frame rate targets).
Jndeed, Capcom take great pains to point out at every available opportunity that their currently announced frame rate targets may fall during particularly graphics-intensive scenes, and that their system requirements for Resident Evil Village may change as we get closer to release. While it would be unusual for PC requirements to change this close to a game's launch, it wouldn't be the first time this has happened in recent memory. Indeed, Control's ray tracing requirements actually decreased just a couple of weeks before it was due to come out back in August 2019 - although I'd be surprised if the same thing happened to Resident Evil Village given Capcom's current warnings.
Still, the good news is that, for the most part, Resident Evil Village's PC requirements look pretty manageable, and I reckon most PCs built within the last few years should be able to run it without much issue. Indeed, Capcom's minimum specification is still expected to hit 60fps at 1920x1080 when the game's quality preset is set to 'Prioritise Performance' - although that's probably code for 'Low' based on other games that use this kind of language in their graphics settings menu. All things considered, though, that's pretty good going for an GTX 1050 Ti / RX 560 spec, as most big blockbuster games these days would be lucky to get 30fps on Low out of the same hardware.
Resident Evil Village minimum PC requirements
CPU: Intel Core i5-7500 / AMD Ryzen 3 1200
RAM: 8GB
GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti (4GB) / AMD Radeon RX 560 (4GB)
Storage: TBD
DirectX: 12
OS: Windows 10 (64-bit)
Resident Evil Village recommended PC requirements (without ray tracing)
CPU: Intel Core i7-8700 / AMD Ryzen 5 3600
RAM: 16GB
GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 / AMD Radeon RX 5700
Storage: TBD
DirectX: 12
OS: Windows 10 (64-bit)
Resident Evil Village recommended PC requirements (with ray tracing)
CPU: Intel Core i7-8700 / AMD Ryzen 5 3600
RAM: 16GB
GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 / AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT (4K, 45fps)
Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 / AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT (4K, 60fps)
Storage: TBD
DirectX: 12
OS: Windows 10 (64-bit, version 2004 or above)
Resident Evil Village's recommended specification is also intended to hit 60fps at 1920x1080, although Capcom haven't provided any particular preset information for this one yet. Once again, though, it all looks pretty doable. If I had to guess, I'd probably say this geared toward a 'High' level preset given the graphics cards listed, but you never know.
Naturally, if you want to throw ray tracing into the mix, then Capcom say you'll need at least an RTX 2060 or RX 6700 XT GPU at your disposal, although that's hardly surprising given these are currently the two entry-level ray tracing cards in Nvidia and AMD's respective rosters. Still, while Capcom haven't yet provided any performance targets for these lower-end ray tracing GPUs just yet, the 4K frame rates they've posted over on their official website do actually fill me with some sort of hope about what ray tracing will be like at lower resolutions.
As you can see above, even an RTX 2070 and RX 6700 XT should be able to achieve a decent 45fps at 4K when set to the game's 'Ray Tracing' preset - which is pretty good going considering a) these aren't traditionally 4K graphics cards, and b) there's no DLSS-like upscaler at play here (yet, anyway) to help boost those frame rates any higher.
Again, it's hard to judge exactly what Village's Ray Tracing quality preset actually entails (will it be an Ultra+ kind of preset like Cyberpunk 2077, for example, or will it be a separate toggle on / off kind of deal like it is in Watch Dogs Legion?), but if these cards can manage these kinds of frame rates at 4K, then they should be more than capable of hitting at least 60fps at 1440p or below. Of course, this is something I'll be testing out in detail once review code is available, so stay tuned for more performance analysis closer to the game's launch on May 7th 2021.