Welcome back PCWorld fans, Keith here with another technical analysis.
This time we’re venturing back to the world of Resident Evil with none other
than Resident Evil Village, the latest entry in the franchise.
In this installment we see the return of the excellent RE Engine
that powered Resident Evil 7 as well as Devil May Cry V. With this iteration, Capcom pushed
the engine to the next generation with Real-Time Ray Tracing support for both Global Illumination
and reflections - each impacting this game heavily in the visual and performance department.
But that’s why I’m here today, to take a look at how AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution comes into
play with Resident Evil Village performance. I will also compare FSR to the included Interlacing
Upscaling option that was already in the game - something that is very akin to checkerboard
rendering. But before I get into that I want to take a moment and give a short refresher
on just what is FidelityFX Super Resolution, or FSR for short.
FSR is AMD’s open-source solution for boosting performance by running a game at
a lower internal resolution and upscaling the final image to as close to native as possible
using a two-pass algorithm. Now this isn’t a toggle that can be applied to all games
like Radeon Image Sharpening is, but one that needs to be implemented on a per-game basis
by the developer like here with Resident Evil Village.
Like I mentioned, when FSR is enabled it runs the game at a lower resolution
(how low depends on the FSR setting used) then it takes that resolution and applies two passes,
the first of which is Edge-Adaptive Spatial Upsampling. This rebuilds the edges of objects
in the game environment to restore them to near-native sharpness. Then it applies the
new RCAS or Robust Contrast-Adaptive Sharpening, which attempts to clean up the texture detail
that is lost in the resolution drop. What you should end up with is better performance
without too much loss in visual quality. Now with that out of the way let's talk
about what makes Resident Evil Village an interesting take on the use of FSR.
FSR carries the primary function of increasing performance while attempting to keep the image as
close to native as possible, which is good! But what makes things curious in this title is the
fact that the game already has its own built-in reconstruction technique that is surprisingly
solid. In fact, it’s the technique employed by consoles to allow them to run the game so
well. I’m talking about none other than the RE Engine’s Interlaced option. To be quite honest
it is quite an impressive option, but it does have flaws that also show up in the FSR options.
Like Red Dead Redemption 2 we find that Resident Evil Village also employs TAA
for its Anti Aliasing of choice. But here in RE8 it does a fairly good job - except on the hair.
Hair is a really difficult feature for TAA to get right without it looking like a mess of artifacts.
Resident Evil Village does a very good job keeping that all together in the native rendering
but it really falls apart when any other option is selected.
The video clip I’m showing is a quick look at the side-by-side showcasing what happens to hair
in this game. Looking around the image, we can see that the environment and textures still look quite
good on all the options, but the hair is noticeably degraded in the interlaced and
FSR Balanced images. Even the FSR Ultra Quality option is still showing degradation, but not much.
This information will become more important as we discuss performance. For now, I want to step aside
and let you see how the game looks in motion as we move down the rendering options. All of this was
captured externally using an AverMedia LiveGamer 4K capture card running off a Radeon RX 6700 XT
at Maximum details including Ray Tracing, all that was changed was the rendering method.
*let Character comparison reel playthrough*
That’s a quick example at how the game looks at the various settings inside an environment
with the characters engaged on screen. But it’s also important in this particular title
to get a good look at the exterior areas of the game as much of it takes place outdoors.
And the vegetation on the ground, as well as the tree branches, can make for some difficult
scenes for these rendering techniques to work with so I’ll let that roll on now.
*Let Environmental comparison reel playthrough
And that’s how things look outdoors. So with all of that
out of the way you have a pretty good idea of what to expect in terms of visuals
from all the render settings here, but the balance of image quality to performance is
the really important part of the equation and that’s what we need to look at next.
For a look at performance, I used the Radeon RX 6700 XT and ran the game at 1440p and 4K with
maximum detail settings, including Ray Tracing options. One of the key drivers for running
features like FSR is to keep the options cranked up while improving performance.
Right off the bat with 1440p we see Interlaced showcased
the most impressive gains, and FSR gave rather conservative gains in this game.
But what about 4K? That's where we should really see it shine with performance uplift and, well,
we do. Things do look better in terms of performance when moving to 4K,
as it makes the 6700XT quite viable in this scenario when compared to the Native option.
But again we see a really impressive showing from the game’s existing Interlaced option.
And if you recall from earlier, we saw that in the character shots showcasing the hair issue,
the Interlaced and Balanced were on par. Later we saw that the Interlaced option did a very
good job handling all the branches in the outdoor scene. It looks like from performance to visuals
the existing Interlaced option is giving FSR a run for its money in this title.
To wrap things up here, I’m presented with a bit of a different feeling than normal. Usually, I’m
really excited to see what new heights features like FSR or DLSS can allow for with games. But
Capcom already did a lot of really good work with their Interlacing option in Resident Evil Village.
Don’t get me wrong, FSR Ultra Quality does a really good job, and the performance uplift is
good. But Interlaced is able to match FSR Balanced in performance at 4K while still coming in looking
somewhere between FSR Ultra Quality and FSR Quality. Quite frankly, that’s where the money is.
When I originally played through this game I did so on my living room gaming PC that was
using a Ryzen 5 3600 and a GTX 1080. I used the Interlacing option to play through the entire game
at 4K. Admittedly I know that it wasn’t native 4K, but it looked great despite not using Ray Tracing.
So while I like that FidelityFX Super Resolution has been added to Resident
Evil Village - and more options are always better than less - I have to
say the RE Engine’s Interlaced option is still what I would recommend over FSR here.
With that all said, have you tried FSR with Resident Evil Village? If so let us know about
your experience and how it compared to the engines built in Interlaced rendering option.
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