Resident Evil Requiem PC Performance Analysis & Tuning Guide – How To Get Best Experience On PC

As PC technology moves at a rapid speed and computer games continue to push the barriers of visual fidelity, it's becoming more difficult for default graphic settings on PC games to find a happy medium between stunning graphics and smooth gameplay, even when playing these games on decently powerful PCs. Resident Evil Requiem, as a modern AAA PC release, shouldn't be any different. However, Capcom had promised that Requiem was built to run smoothly across a wide range of PC builds, and doesn’t expect to see a repeat of the performance issues seen with Monster Hunter Wilds — a reassuring claim given how much those technical woes have lingered in the community.

As such, the purpose of this guide is to provide you with insight into how Resident Evil Requiem behaves and runs on our test system, not to mention examine the visual and performance profile of the game's graphical settings, and therefore establish a list of optimized graphics settings, which you can use to strike an optimal balance between performance and visual fidelity on your rig.

A Short Technical Overview Of Resident Evil Requiem

Releasing on February 27, 2026, on PC (via Steam and Epic Games Store) as well as PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch 2, Resident Evil Requiem is the ninth mainline entry in Capcom’s iconic survival horror franchise. Built on the RE Engine and blending classic tension with modern gameplay innovations, the game thrusts players into a chilling narrative that alternates between horror-focused gameplay segments with FBI technical analyst Grace Ashcroft and action-focused gameplay sections with veteran agent Leon S. Kennedy as they confront nightmarish threats in and around a devastated Raccoon City.

Let's begin by taking a look at the game's PC system requirements, courtesy of Capcom:

Tier	CPU	GPU	RAM	Storage	Performance Target
Minimum	Intel Core i5‑8500 / AMD Ryzen 5 3500	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 6 GB / AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT 8 GB	16 GB	An SSD is required. Required disk space is not indicated, but the pre-release build of the game takes ~74 GB of space on our test system's SSD	1080p at 30 FPS using upscaling from 640p
Recommended	Intel Core i7‑8700 / AMD Ryzen 5 5500	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER 8 GB / AMD Radeon RX 6600 8 GB	16 GB	-	1080p at 60 FPS using upscaling from 720p

As we can see from the above specs table, the game doesn't seem to be asking for exceedingly powerful hardware for both its minimum and recommended PC specs, which is hopefully a sign that the game will be well optimized and scalable across a wide range of PC hardware, rather than relying on technically dated graphics to showcase its world and characters.

We were also glad to see that upon launching the game, a comprehensive Pipeline State Object (PSO)/shader compilation step — that took less than a minute on our test system's CPU (an Intel Core i7-14700K) — was triggered. Thankfully, this "shader burn" process was quite effective, as we failed to spot a single instance of shader compilation-related stutters, which is great news for PC gamers looking to pick up the game. Further, it also didn't seem to suffer from any other kind of stuttering or hitching (such as traversal stutters, for example) in our first few hours with it, which is a great sign for the game's overall performance stability, especially since the previous game release — Resident Evil 4 — did have a bunch of these traversal hitches. Obviously, the game could still end up suffering from stutters on rigs that aren't quite up to snuff, especially those with insufficient RAM and/or VRAM amounts.

Another interesting thing we noticed upon the game's first launch on our test system, it executed a short benchmark to determine the capabilities of our PC's hardware:

Upon completion of this short benchmark, the game then prompted us to choose between either a Quality mode or a Performance mode, which was a bit strange for a PC game, as this kind of bifurcation in graphical settings is usually reserved for game consoles. Therefore, we recommend ignoring the game's chosen default settings for your PC, and instead manually tweaking every graphics setting to your liking, in order to maximize your enjoyment of the game on your PC, as this is one of the PC platform's main strengths after all!

A Deep Dive Into Resident Evil Requiem's Graphics Settings

In this section, we will be checking out the various graphics settings in Resident Evil Requiem in detail, using comparison videos that should hopefully accurately portray both the graphics and performance of each setting's various quality levels, thus allowing us to determine which settings strike the best visuals/performance balance, which is the basis for establishing optimized graphics settings in this game, or any other game for that matter.

Further, the graphics settings comparisons in this section have all been made on a system with the following relevant specs:

• CPU: Intel Core i7-14700K;
• RAM: 32 GB DDR5-7000 CL34;
• Storage: 2 TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD;
• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 24 GB;
• Operating System: Windows 11 25H2;
• All system firmware, drivers, BIOS, and OS updates were fully applied before testing.

In addition, all of the comparisons were done under fully GPU-limited scenarios at a resolution of 1440p, except for one comparison video, which we shall see later. Furthermore, please be aware of the fact that lowering GPU-heavy graphics settings will not affect the game's performance if the rest of your system isn't powerful enough to keep up with your GPU.

With that said, let's take a look at the game's various graphics settings menu, with all of its sections and sub-sections:

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As we can see, the game has a really expansive graphics settings menu, which is rife with multiple sections and sub-sections. Let's break down what each section has in terms of settings:

• The Display section: This section has classic graphics settings to control display mode, brightness, resolution, VSync, HDR, etc.
• The Image section: This section has multiple subsections, which are the following:
  • Shared Settings: This subsection has settings such as resolution, motion blur, ray tracing, etc.
  • Quality Settings: This subsection allows players to control graphics settings coarsely according to three main categories: Graphics Quality, Upscaling Quality, and Lighting and Shadow Quality.
  • Advanced Quality Settings: This subsection contains the individual settings of the three aforementioned categories of quality settings. As such, it allows a more fine-grained control of the game's graphics settings.

In what follows, we will be taking a deep dive into the performance/visuals profile — by analyzing comparison videos — of every relevant graphics setting that the game has on offer.

Motion Blur

This is a classic setting that the vast majority of PC gamers know about, and the game's description of it says that "it's only used in cutscenes and certain moments of the game". It also vastly depends on player preference, though it doesn't seem to be popular with most PC players. Hence, our recommendation is to turn it off.

Ray Tracing

As we can see from the above video comparisons — in both indoors and outdoors scenes — this setting controls whether real-time ray tracing (or even path tracing) effects — such as ray-traced reflections and global illumination — are used to enhance the game's lighting fidelity. This setting depends on how powerful your GPU is. We recommend turning it off if your GPU is barely at the recommended spec level. Otherwise, use Normal if your GPU is at least at the level of RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB/RX 7700 XT. Use High if your GPU is at least at the level of RTX 5070/RX 9070. And last but not least, enable path tracing only if you have a seriously powerful GPU. The minimum GPUs we recommend for enabling are RTX 4080/5070 Ti. Unfortunately, path tracing can only be currently used in the game with NVIDIA RTX GPUs, as it relies on NVIDIA's DLSS Ray Reconstruction for denoising.

Hair Strands

This setting controls the visual fidelity of the player characters' hair, and is only relevant if you're using the third-person camera view or during cutscenes. Despite its somewhat high cost on the GPU, we recommend keeping itenabled, as it can greatly increase your immersion in the game. Unless you're really struggling with performance, you can safely disable it.

Texture Quality

This setting controls the resolution of the game's textures. We recommend Low at all times for GPUs with 6-8 GB of VRAM (<6 GB VRAM GPUs need not apply, sadly, according to the game's specs), Normal for GPUs with 10 GB of VRAM, and High for GPUs with 12+ GB of VRAM. Please note that enabling any level of ray tracing level will increase the game's VRAM consumption, and it will thus require even more VRAM than previously said, in order to guarantee a stutter-free experience.

Texture Filter Quality

This setting controls texture filtering quality. Seeing as there's barely any performance difference between the lowest and highest levels on our test system's GPU — and likely any modern GPU from the past half-decade or so — we recommend keeping this setting at its maximum, X16 anisotropic filtering value.

Anti-aliasing

This setting allows for enabling temporal anti-aliasing (either by itself or with FXAA) in order to tackle the game's jagged edges and shimmering. If you're not a fan of temporal upscaling, then we recommend setting this setting to TAA.

Mesh Quality

This setting seems to control the geometric quality of the game's various meshes. Seeing as there's a somewhat notable performance gain with it set to Low (vs Standard) without a major loss in visual fidelity, we recommend setting it to Low.

Screen Space Reflections

This setting controls whether screen-space reflections are enabled or not. Since SSR can make a big difference in visual fidelity, we recommend keeping this setting ON, unless you're absolutely struggling with performance.

Subsurface Scattering

This setting controls the accuracy of light's penetration of translucent materials such as human skin. We recommend setting it to Low, as we feel it strikes the best visuals/performance profile.

Lens Distortion

This setting can add some stylistic lens distortion effects to simulate camera lenses. We recommend keeping it OFF as it not only has a small performance impact, but we also strongly feel that the game looks cleaner with it disabled.

Depth of Field

This setting mainly seems to affect cutscenes, as it adds a stylistic depth of field that simulates how near and far objects are pictured through a camera (or eye) lens. We recommend keeping this setting ON, unless players don't like its effect, then they can safely disable it.

Upscaling Technology

This setting allows players to utilize temporal/spatial upscaling technologies in order to improve performance, at a given cost to visual fidelity. Our recommendations for this setting depend upon your GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX owners should obviously use DLSS Super Resolution. AMD Pre-RDNA4 GPU owners should use FSR 3.1.5 upscaling, and AMD RDNA4 GPU users should enable FSR 4 upscaling (or FSR ML upscaling) through the Adrenalin graphics driver interface. Intel Arc GPU owners are unfortunately stuck with FSR 3.1.5 upscaling, as Capcom inexplicably opted to include the older and much maligned FSR 1 spatial upscaling technology, rather than Intel XeSS upscaling. All other GPU owners that meet the game's min spec should only consider FSR 3.1.5 upscaling.

Frame Generation

This setting doesn't actually increase performance, but rather trades some latency and visual artifacts for extra visual smoothness, which we believe is a great fit for this game given its relatively slow-paced and single-player nature. We therefore recommend enabling frame generation, provided your base framerate is at least consistently hitting 60 FPS or higher.

Particle Lighting

Given this setting's relatively cheap cost and the added realism of having small particles illuminated by artificial sources of light such as flashlights, we recommend keeping this setting ON.

Volumetric Fog Resolution

This setting controls the resolution of volumetric fog. We feel as though the Normal level achieves the best visuals/performance ratio, so we recommend it.

Lens Dirt

This setting attempts to simulate a dirty camera lens. We recommend turning it OFF as it seems to have a small performance hit, with questionable benefits for visual fidelity.

Lens Flare

This setting attempts to realistically simulate the lens flare effect, which seems to have a somewhat small performance hit. We believe that this performance hit isn't fully justified, so as a consequence of that, we recommend keeping this setting OFF.

Shadow Quality

This setting seems to control the resolution of the game's shadow maps. We feel as though the High quality level strikes an optimal balance of visuals and performance, so we recommend it here.

Contact Shadows

This setting didn't seem to make a huge difference in both visuals and performance, so we have no qualms with recommending that people keep it ON.

Ambient Occlusion

For the penultimate graphics setting, we have the ambient occlusion effect, which attempts to simulate soft, diffuse shadows in creases, cracks, and corners where ambient light is blocked. Since there's barely a difference in performance between the highest and lowest quality levels of this setting, and given its importance for grounded visual fidelity, we recommend keeping this setting at High.

VFX Quality

We sadly couldn't capture exact like-for-like video footage of this setting set to either Low or Standard. However, it didn't seem like there were any major differences in both the visual fidelity and performance of the game's special effects, such as zombie blood splatter. We therefore recommend leaving this setting on Standard.

Optimized Graphics Settings & Tips On How To Get The Best Experience in Resident Evil Requiem On PC

Optimized graphics settings

Wrapping it all up, here are the final, recommended optimized graphics settings for Resident Evil Requiem, which we feel strike an optimal balance in terms of both performance and visuals for this game:

Graphics Setting	Optimized Value
Motion Blur	OFF — depends on player preference
Ray Tracing	Depends on GPU horsepower: - Normal: RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB / RX 7700 XT - High: RTX 5070 / RX 9070 - Path Tracing: RTX 4080 / RTX 5070 Ti (NVIDIA GPU exclusive)
Hair Strands	ON — Only relevant in third-person camera view and cutscenes. Can be disabled if struggling with performance in third-person camera view
Texture Quality	Depends on GPU VRAM capacity: - 6-8 GB: Low - 10 GB: Normal - 12+ GB: High Note: enabling ray tracing further increases VRAM capacity pressure
Texture Filter Quality	High (Anisotropic Filtering X16)
Anti-aliasing	TAA — temporal upscaling will override this setting, should it be preferred
Mesh Quality	Low
Screen Space Reflections	ON
Subsurface Scattering	Low
Lens Distortion	OFF
Depth of Field	ON — also depends on player preference
Upscaling Technology	Depends on GPU vendor: - NVIDIA RTX GPUs: DLSS Super Resolution - AMD pre-RDNA4 GPUs: FSR 3.1.5 upscaling - AMD RDNA4 GPUs: FSR 4 upscaling - Intel Arc GPUs: FSR 3.1.5 upscaling - Every other GPU that at least meets the min spec: FSR 3.1.5 upscaling
Frame Generation	Enable only if base framerate is at least 60 FPS
Particle Lighting	ON
Volumetric Fog Resolution	Normal
Lens Dirt	OFF
Lens Flare	OFF
Shadow Quality	High
Contact Shadows	ON
Ambient Occlusion	High
VFX Quality	Standard

With our optimized graphics settings established, let us look at how they improve performance — at a minor cost in terms of visual fidelity — on our test system, first via a demanding outdoors scene:

Then second, via a less demanding indoors scene:

Note: since the indoors scene is quite a bit less GPU-heavy than the outdoors scene, we were unfortunately CPU-limited at our base resolution of 1440p. Consequently, we had to perform our max vs optimized graphics settings comparison here at a higher resolution of 4K. Further, it is also important to keep in mind that the vast majority of the game takes place inside less demanding, indoors areas.

As we can see from the above comparison videos, our optimized graphics settings (without ray tracing) result in an 18% increase in both average and 1% low average FPS figures in our chosen outdoors scene, whereas the performance increase is a bit milder in our chosen — and less demanding — indoors scene, at 13%/12% increases to average FPS/1% low average FPS figures respectively. These performance increases might not be huge, but given that we didn't lose a considerable amount of visual fidelity, we'd say that it's a decent win overall for this game's performance/visuals ratio on our test system! Furthermore, we strongly recommend opting to combine our optimized graphics settings with a suitable temporal upscaling technology and mode combo, in order to truly maximize Requiem's performance/visuals ratio. Also, enabling frame generation should also be a great boon to help you take advantage of a high refresh rate monitor, should you have one, of course, and should your base framerate be consistently hitting 60 FPS, with decent frametime consistency to boot.

We've also decided to take a look at how our established optimized graphics settings perform on another, more constrained test system, which is a laptop with the following relevant specs:

• CPU: Intel Core i7-12700H;
• RAM: 16 GB DDR4-3200 CL22;
• Storage: 1 TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD;
• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop GPU 8 GB (140W variant);
• Operating System: Windows 11 25H2;
• All system firmware, drivers, BIOS, and OS updates were fully applied before testing.

We ran our max vs optimized graphics settings (no ray tracing) comparison on our laptop test system, in the following demanding outdoors scene, which is set right at the beginning of the game:

This time, we have decided to showcase our performance data — in the form of average FPS, 1% low average FPS, and 0.1% low average FPS figures — using popular benchmarking software CapFrameX:

As we can see from the above CapFrameX data, our optimized graphics settings resulted in a 23%/66%/63% increase in average FPS/1% low average FPS/0.1% low average FPS performance figures, respectively, in our chosen test scene and on our laptop test system. These performance increases resulted in a noticeably smoother experience on our laptop test system, which again further highlights the need to properly tune graphics settings in modern, graphically intensive, and demanding AAA PC titles.

Extra tips to get the most out of your Resident Evil Requiem experience

Thankfully, Resident Evil Requiem seems to be a properly optimized PC release, so there really isn't much else we can say to help you further improve your technical experience with the game. Still, we'd like to share a few extra tips that we think may be helpful for you, as a player.

Firstly, we've found out that the game is actually more demanding to run when using the third-person camera view, which makes sense as the player character model is also rendered with it, which becomes especially more intensive if you have the impressive hair simulation option Hair Strands enabled. The following video should highlight the kind of performance hit you can expect by playing the game in a third-person camera view, instead of a first-person one:

Secondly, we'd also like to alert you to the fact that we encountered somewhat frequent frametime spikes/stutters on our desktop test system (with an RTX 4090) when we had DLSS Frame Generation enabled. We hope this issue can be fixed via a potential day 1 patch for the game or via the upcoming NVIDIA Game Ready graphics driver, which should provide official support for the game. Also, speaking of frame generation, the game also seemed to automatically enable DLSS FG — alongside DLSS Super Resolution Performance mode — whenever path tracing was enabled. As such, please keep this in mind should you find yourself experimenting with this option.

Thirdly, we've also noticed that the game seems to have a forced film grain effect, which sadly cannot be disabled via the in-game graphics settings menu. We then proceeded to scour the game's folder for any graphics settings-related files, and we eventually found a config.ini file that contained a FilmGrainEnable binary option. We then set that value to False, but unfortunately, it still did not disable the film grain effect. As such, we hope that Capcom either exposes the ability to turn off the film grain option from the game's graphics settings menu or actually fixes a potential bug with this option, by making it actually affect the enablement of the film grain cinematic effect, as not all people necessarily like it.

Lastly, the very last tip we'd like to share is exclusively aimed towards hopeful Resident Evil Requiem gamers with an Intel Arc GPU. Sadly, given that the game does not support Intel XeSS upscaling — XeSS Frame/Multi Frame Generation are also not supported — Intel Arc GPU owners are stuck with either FSR 3.1.5 or FSR 1 upscaling, which are both considerably inferior to the latest version of Intel's XeSS 2 temporal upscaling technology, especially the Arc GPU-exclusive XMX path which uses heavier and more accurate models to further improve fidelity. As such, we'd like to recommend that Intel Arc GPU users use the popular OptiScaler mod to enable not just XeSS 2 upscaling, but also Xe Frame Generation, in order to improve their technical experience with the game.

Final Words

After extensive testing of the game, we can confidently say that Resident Evil Requiem’s PC performance profile is one of the more impressive launches we’ve seen in the past few years. Even on mid-range hardware, the game delivers smooth performance with barely any hitches or stutters — even on somewhat modest hardware — with only the most demanding features like path tracing showing noticeable dips in performance in the most demanding scenes. This speaks to both Capcom’s ongoing refinement of the RE Engine and smart choices and trade-offs made to maximize the game's performance/visuals ratio on their targeted platforms.

Our findings mirror those of several technical reviewers in the gaming/tech press, who have praised the title’s remarkable optimization, particularly when compared to many recent AAA PC releases, including Capcom's own titles, such as Dragon's Dogma 2 and Monster Hunter Wilds. As such, PC players with decent hardware specs that at least meet the game's recommended specs can safely purchase the game, knowing that it'll both run and look great on their machines.

For more on Resident Evil Requiem, please check out our review of the game from this link!

This performance analysis was based on a Steam copy of Resident Evil Requiem provided by publisher Capcom.

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