The Resident Evil 4 remake looks glorious with path tracing in certain scenarios, but the increased visual quality comes at a high cost, especially at 4K resolution.
A new video shared by MxBenchmarkPC puts the game's vanilla ray tracing features, which are limited to ray-traced reflections, and modded path tracing side-by-side, highlighting how much path tracing improves the game's visuals in certain scenarios despite the lack of denoisers by adding more reflective surfaces and more. This, however, comes at a huge performance cost, as the frame rate is essentially halved in most scenarios on an RTX 4080 GPU and with NVIDIA DLSS 3.7.
The Resident Evil 4 remake isn't the only entry in the series that has recently received a path tracing mod, as every other game powered by the RE Engine received one earlier this month. Dragon's Dogma 2, also powered by the RE Engine, received one last month, introducing significant visual improvements. Unfortunately, this path tracing mod is no longer working in Resident Evil 4 due to an early 2026 update, which also introduced some performance issues.
The Resident Evil 4 remake is now available on PC, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X, and Xbox Series S. Learn more about the game by checking out Nathan's review.
Resident Evil 4 was the ultimate test of Capcom’s remake skills, and unfortunately, they buckled a bit under the pressure. The game suffers from minor mechanical issues and doesn’t reinvent or elevate the original material as boldly as some might have hoped it would. That said, Capcom hasn’t broken anything either as this is still a fun, inventive thrill ride that has been brought up to modern technical standards in striking fashion. The new Resident Evil 4 is well worth it for fans of the series, just keep your hopes slightly in check and you won’t be spin-kicked by inflated expectations.
About the author: Francesco De Meo has been covering video games and technology since 2012, starting his career at small outlets like Gamersyndrome and GeekSnack. After joining Wccftech gaming section in 2015, he quickly expanded his video gaming coverage with in-depth reporting, interviews with iconic industry figures such as Grasshopper Manufacture founder and No More Heroes creator Goichi "Suda51" Suda, Resident Evil series creator Shinji Mikami, Team NINJA's president and Nioh series director Fumihiko Yasuda, and Silent Hill creator Keiichiro Toyama, reviews and on-the-ground coverage of major industry events such as Gamescom and E3. When he's not reporting or reviewing, Francesco can be found playing the genres he loves most, spending time with his six cats, reading, writing music, playing guitar and drumming for his progressive rock band.
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