Capcom has revealed the

Resident Evil Village system requirements

for the PC version on Steam. The sequel follows the saga of Ethan Winters, this time with some apparently very large vampire ladies. Based on what we’ve seen, you’ll benefit from having one of the

best graphics cards

along with something from our list of the

best CPUs for gaming

when the game arrives on May 7.

The eighth entry in the series (VIII from Village), this will be the first Resident Evil to feature ray tracing technology. The developers have tapped AMD to help with the ray tracing implementation, however, so it’s not clear whether it will run on Nvidia’s RTX cards at launch, or if it will require a patch — and it’s unlikely to get DLSS support, though it could make for a stunning showcase for AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution if AMD can pull some strings.

We’ve got about a month to wait before the official launch. In the meantime, here are the official system requirements.

Capcom notes that in either case, the game targets 1080p at 60 fps, though the framerate “might drop in graphics-intensive scenes.” While the minimum requirements specify using the “Prioritize Performance” setting, it’s not clear what settings are used for the recommended system.

The Resident Evil Village minimum system requirements are also for running the game without ray tracing, with a minimum requirement of an RTX 2060 (and likely future AMD GPUs like Navi 23), and a recommendation of at least an RTX 2070 or RX 6700 XT if you want to enable ray tracing. There’s no mention of installation size yet, so we’ll have to wait and see just how much of our SSD the game wants to soak up.

The CPU specs are pretty tame, and it’s very likely you can use lower spec processors. For example, the Ryzen 3 1200 is the absolute bottom of the entire Ryzen family stack, with a 4-core/4-thread configuration running at up to 3.4GHz. The Core i5-7500 also has a 4-core/4-thread configuration, but runs at up to 3.8GHz, and it’s generally higher in IPC than first generation Ryzen. 

You should be able to run the game on even older/slower CPUs, though perhaps not at 60 fps. The recommended settings are a decent step up in performance potential, moving to 6-core/12-thread CPUs for both AMD and Intel, which are fairly comparable processors.

The graphics card will almost certainly play a bigger role in performance than the CPU, and while the baseline GTX 1050 Ti and RX 560 4GB are relatively attainable (the game apparently requires, maybe, 4GB or more VRAM), we wouldn’t be surprised if that’s with some form of dynamic resolution scaling enabled. Crank up the settings and the GTX 1070 and RX 5700 are still pretty modest cards, though the AMD card is significantly faster — not that you can find either in stock at acceptable prices these days, as we show in our

GPU pricing index

. But if you want to run the full-fat version of Resident Evil Village, with all the DXR bells and whistles at 1440p or 4K, you’re almost certainly going to need something far more potent.

Full size images: RE Village RT On / RE Village RT OffAMD showed a preview of the game running with and without ray tracing during its

Where Gaming Begins, Episode 3

presentation in early March. The pertinent section of the video starts at the 9:43 mark, though we’ve snipped the comparison images above for reference. The improved lighting and reflections are clearly visible in the RT enabled version, but critically we don’t know how well the game runs with RT enabled.

We’re looking forward to testing Resident Evil Village on a variety of GPUs and CPUs next month when it launches on PC, Xbox, and PlayStation. Based on what we’ve seen from other RT-enabled games promoted by AMD (e.g. Dirt 5), we expect frame rates will take a significant hit.

But like we said, this may also be the debut title for FidelityFX Super Resolution, and if so, that’s certainly something we’re eager to test. What we’d really like to see is a game that supports both FidelityFX Super Resolution and DLSS, just so we could do some apples-to-apples comparisons, but it may be a while before such a game appears.