Introduction

The 2023 remake of Resident Evil 4 brings the most popular chapter from the Resident Evil franchise, the 2005 original Resident Evil 4, into the modern era. This is a remake, and not a remaster. The game has been redesigned from the ground-up to retell the original’s story; unlike something like Portal RTX, which would qualify as a remaster. The most iconic character of the Resident Evil universe from the PlayStation-era original, Leon Kennedy, makes a comeback. Following the destruction of Raccoon City, Kennedy becomes an agent of the U.S. Government and is sent on a mission to rescue the President’s daughter from somewhere in Iberian Europe. She is being held captive by a cult that turned people in the area into zombies. In his quest, Leon gets infected, too. From here on, it is a roller coaster ride filled with interesting characters, twists and turns, and some very challenging encounters with a strange and unknown enemy.

As we mentioned earlier, Resident Evil 4 (2023) is a remake and not a remaster. All its visuals are redesigned, its controls are modernized to resemble those of Resident Evil games released over the past few years (such as RE 8: Village); there’s a new item-crafting and parrying mechanism. The game is based on Capcom’s in-house RE engine, the latest version of it, which also powers titles such as Devil May Cry 5, and RE 8: Village. The game is designed to highlight many of the hardware capabilities of Sony’s latest PlayStation 5 consoles, which means there’s enough for your gaming PC to chew on with faster hardware. The game supports certain next-generation graphics features such as ray traced reflections, and AMD Fidelity FX 2.

This benchmark review will evaluate the performance of Resident Evil 4 on a wide selection of modern graphics cards, show image quality comparisons and look at what’s required in terms of VRAM usage.