Resident Evil 4 Path Tracing looks incredible running on a RTX 4080, but the performance...

Capcom's Dragon's Dogma 2 was released earlier this year. It took the publisher's impressive RE Engine (initially built for the Resident Evil franchise and games). It expanded its capabilities to fit the open-world RPG style of the Dragon's Dogma franchise. Hidden inside the engine was a full path-tracing mode that Capcom was playing around with, as seen here.

Now, you can enable full path tracing in the impressive Resident Evil 4 Remake via the same REFramework developer window while modding in DLSS 3.7 for improved upscaling and image quality. Although Resident Evil 4 is a game tailor-made for baked lighting (the time of day never changes), path tracing still makes a massive difference.

Certain night scenes and some objects look off, but several examples in the video presented by MxBenchmarkPC showcase the different path tracing, or complete ray tracing can bring to a game. Even when compared to the game's existing ray-tracing implementation.

Here are a few.

Naturally, the performance hit is huge even when paired with a powerful GeForce RTX 4080. Using the DLSS Quality setting, at best, we see the performance cut in half, dropping from around 130 FPS to 65 FPS. However, there are scenes and examples where it drops from around 120 FPS to around 40 FPS - a massive 66% drop. Frame Generation would certainly help here, as, for the most part, the game does look playable.

1440p performance fares much better, with the frame rate hovering at around 90-100 FPS and path tracing enabled. It's worth noting that this is an unofficial mod to the game, and Resident Evil 4 Remake or Dragon's Dogma 2 are not optimized for path tracing like Cyberpunk 2077 or Alan Wake 2.

• Read more: Dragon's Dogma 2 has a hidden Path Tracing mode on PC, and it looks incredible
• Read more: RTX Remix updated with DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction to improve ray-tracing quality for mods
• Read more: Unreal Engine 5.4 brings significant updates to ray tracing and rendering for 60 FPS gaming
• Read more: AMD's next-gen RDNA 4 Radeon graphics will feature 'brand-new' ray-tracing hardware