2 weeks ago
14
Been a while since I’ve done one of these. Been even longer since I didn’t have a complaint about wonky performance or some manner of debilitating stutter issue to open it with. Nope, Resident Evil Requiem is, on the technical side, a big and shiny blockbuster like they should be made: a good looker and a smooth runner both, almost regardless of graphics card heft. It is, as Capcom promised, the anti-Monster Hunter Wilds. Not a bad shooty-horror game, either.
Ahead of release tomorrow, I’ve put together a settings guide (see a few scrolls down) that’s what you might call an 'optimised' configuration. Really though, Requiem ticks along nicely enough that this is less about grasping for scraps of framerate and more about simply navigating its extensive, often interlinking graphical choices. More so than previous Resident Evils, Requiem is teeming with PC-specific tools and tricks, from the obvious DLSS and FSR upscalers to Multi Frame Generation (MFG) and full-on path tracing – all of which shows care for the Windows version, but does mean the options menu has more pages than Dune. Still, at least it doesn’t run worse when you walk near a cat.
Resident Evil Requiem system requirements and PC performance
Both minimum and recommended specs are up a bit on 2023’s Resident Evil 4 remake, including a base RAM expectation of 16GB and the explicit ask for SSD storage. These should still be easily meetable in 2026, though. The inclusion of a 6GB GPU in the minimum specs bodes well for enduringly popular 8GB cards, and even the recommended RTX 2060 Super was only a mid-ranger when it was new. In 2019.
Resident Evil Requiem minimum PC specs
- OS: Windows 11 (64-bit required)
- CPU: Intel Core i5-8500 / AMD Ryzen 5 3500
- RAM: 16GB
- GPU: GeForce GTX 1660 6GB / AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT 8GB
- DirectX: Version 12
- Storage: SSD required
Resident Evil Requiem recommend PC specs
- OS: Windows 11 (64-bit required)
- CPU: Intel Core i7-8700 / AMD Ryzen 5 5500
- RAM: 16GB
- GPU: GeForce RTX 2060 Super 8GB / AMD Radeon RX 6600 8GB
- DirectX: Version 12
- Storage: SSD required
A couple of addendums: one, there obviously isn’t a storage capacity requirement in these, so make sure you have at least 73.33GB to spare. That’s how much a Requiem install eats up, per Steam. And two, you don’t actually need Windows 11, strictly speaking. I’ve played for hours on my stubbornly Windows 10-running personal rig, without issue.
That’s not the only way in which Requiem’s specs play it overly cautious, either. I don’t have any of the specified GPUs in my kit cupboard, but a GTX 1070 – which is older than but roughly on par with the GTX 1660 – had little trouble while nosing around a dust-caked Raccoon City. On the Lowest preset with FSR 3.1 on Quality mode, it averaged a respectable 49fps, and that was with the Leon-fringe-enhancing hair strands setting left on by default. On the visibly better-looking Low, and still with Hair 2 enabled, that average only fell to 47fps.
More modern entry-level GPUs fare well too. Sticking to 1080p, the latest RTX 5050 cruised to 118fps with the Max preset and DLSS Quality, and adding High-quality ray tracing effects only bumped it down to 88fps. Also, whereas fellow RE Engine work Monster Hunter Wilds leaned on frame generation to cover up its performance shortcomings, Requiem lets frame gen be used as it’s supposed to: cranking up visual smoothness in games that are already running well. Still with ray tracing, then, DLSS 4’s MFG got the RTX 5050 all the way up to 217fps on its 4x setting, without adding a particularly noticeable degree of input lag. As frame gen does, heavily, when trying to work with a low base framerate.
Intel’s B580 GPU lacks DLSS 4 support, but still managed good performances even without upscaling. At native-rez 1080p, it ran the Max preset at a slick 74fps, and 54fps with High ray tracing. Cutting RT effects and adding Quality-level FSR also made the B580 viable for 1440p, where it averaged 77fps on the High preset.
Other strong candidates for this resolution include the RTX 4060 (80fps on Max, with DLSS Quality) and the older RTX 3070 (99fps on High, also with DLSS Quality). Or, if you’ve more recently upgraded, the Radeon RX 9070 XT. This ate 1440p alive, combining the Max preset, High ray tracing, and enhanced FSR 4 upscaling for 135fps. It’s a good 'budget' option for 4K, too. Leaving all those other settings unchanged, the RX 9070 XT still managed 81fps at 4K, and dropping the ray-traced stuff saw it climb back up to 110fps.
The only exception to all this happy funtime framerate abundance – other than a single, 30-second stroll down an abnormally busy street in the intro – is path tracing. On an Nvidia RTX GPU, this gets some help from DLSS Ray Reconstruction by default, but even on the mighty RTX 5080 it cuts performance right down. At 4K, with the Max preset and DLSS on Quality, this GPU produced a very tidy 96fps, but swapping RT for PT brought it to just 46fps.
Switching DLSS upscaling from Quality to Performance did help, making it 67fps, and enabling 2x MFG on top produced a good-looking 118fps without too much latency. It’s also worth noting that path tracing is, in some ways, a tangible visual upgrade: wet, reflective surfaces don’t have the thick and oily quality that they can under ray tracing, and lighting in general becomes more naturalistic. This can even provide a helping hand to the horror, plunging dark areas even further into pitch blackness and potentially making you cling to your torch just that little bit tighter. Half the framerate is a big, big price to pay for it, mind, so I’m still inclined to stick with ray tracing as the more balanced of the two premium effect-upgraders.
Either way, I’m not complaining too much. A lot of recent AAA games have been so brutal on middling and lower-end PCs that something like ray tracing, let alone path tracing, would need to be immediately dismissed as a harmful vice. Requiem, on the other hand, performs so well that tracin’ rays seems perfectly attainable, even if your desktop parts are a few years old.
It’ll run on handheld PCs, too. I’m still working on a proper Steam Deck analysis but early testing suggests that, with upscaling and Low settings, a reasonable 40-45fps is on the cards, and that’s just on the original LCD Deck from 2022. It’s more like 50fps on the Lenovo Legion Go 2, despite a higher screen rez, so newer, brawnier portables will be fine too.
Resident Evil Requiem best settings guide
For all the breadth of Requiem’s visual settings, many of them have little to no bearing on desktop performance. I learned this pretty quickly on the humble RTX 4060, which at native 1080p averaged 82fps on Max quality and 97fps on Lowest – a relatively narrow gap, nearly half of which is accounted for by the drop from Low to Lowest, with the former scoring 89fps.
Max quality, 1920x1080, DLAA
However, Requiem is unusual in that it also offers a lighting and shadow quality preset, governing a number of individual options that most games would cover with the main preset. For the record, all the benchmark results you’ve seen so far have been with this set to Normal, Requiem’s equivalent to Medium. And cranking this up can cut performance – shadow quality alone dropped my RTX 4060 from 82fps to 66fps when changing from Normal to Max. Again, Normal both looks and runs fine, but to help make sense of all these switches and toggles, here’s a straight list of the settings I’d recommend for most PCs:
- Motion blur: Off
- Ray tracing: Normal
- Hair strands: On
- Texture quality: High
- Texture filter quality: High (ANISO x16)
- Mesh quality: Low
- Screen space reflections: On
- Subsurface scattering: High
- Lens distortion: On (+ Chromatic aberration)
- Depth of field: On
- Upscaling technology/Upscaling mode: DLSS/FSR 4/FSR 3.1 on Quality mode
- Nvidia Reflex Low Latency: On + Boost (if supported)
- Particle lighting: On
- Volumetric fog generation: Normal
- Lens dirt: On
- Lens flare: Standard
- Shadow quality: Normal
- Contact shadows: On
- Ambient occlusion: High
- VFX quality: High
Yes, that is ray tracing in there. No, you don’t need to keep it if you don’t want to, though to my eyes it does make for more convincing shadows and a better contrast between light and dark.
Either way, these should keep visuals and performance agreeably balanced, with a particularly high framerate boost from the upscalers. DLSS 4 and FSR 4, especially, look sharp enough even at 1080p, which has rarely been the case with their older versions.
I’ve also kept hair strands enabled because, sue me, I like RE Engine hair. When disabled, this did provide a not-insubstantial boost of 7fps to the RTX 4060, but then it’s also one of the most noticeable fidelity downgrades, so keep it on if you can afford it. Shadows and volumetric fog, conversely, look good enough at Normal that it’s not worth dropping frames to get them up to High or Max.
As for frame generation, it’s not something I’ve felt compelled to use while playing Requiem on my own time, and thus I’m reticent to include it in a guide to "recommended" settings. To be clear, though, this is as suitable a game for frame gen as any AAA effort I’ve seen, and implementation – of DLSS 4 and the less sophisticated FSR alike – appears finely done. As long as you’ve got a fast enough monitor to take full advantage, and are already getting at least 60fps or so without it, frame gen can work well here.
Gosh, look at me being nice about fake frames. This game really is an outlier.
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