Well, here’s a good surprise. Resident Evil Village is getting support for lightning tracking, AMD announced tonight during its RX 6700 XT reveal event. They only showed a brief clip of the game’s lightning streak in action during their presentation, but from the looks of things we can expect to see beautiful lightning streaks on their polished mansion floors and perhaps some lightning-streaked shadows as well.
The real question, however, is whether the awe-inspiring majesty of the game’s main villain, the enormous Lady Dimitrescu, will also be dealt with with some reflections drawn by charming rays. After all, great vampires weren’t made for reflexes, were they? And if that won’t give us accurate 9-foot 6in reflections of this woman who is taller than a real ostrich, then what’s the use?
I asked AMD for more details on this important scenario, but in the meantime, here’s the clip in question so you can see for yourself how shiny those lightning-streaked mansion floors will look when the game launches on May 7th.
Again, there are few details on what type of PC you will need to run Resident Evil Village with lightning tracking enabled, but judging by the very specs recommended by AMD, it looks like you will be a beast in the old frame rate department. AMD is currently recommending its top-of-the-line RX 6800 XT to play it with enabled ray tracing, along with a very basic Ryzen 5 1600 CPU, but as far as we know, this could be playing in 4K at maximum settings, like AMD do not mention anything more about the resolution or the wider game quality settings. As for playing without ray tracing enabled, AMD currently recommends an RX 5700 XT video card and the same Ryzen 5 1600 CPU.
It is also unclear whether support for Resident Evil Village lightning tracking will be available on Nvidia RTX cards at this time. I would imagine so, given that AMD’s ray-tracing gubbins are all based on open source technologies, such as Microsoft’s DirectX Ray Tracing technology, rather than AMD’s proprietary material, but at the same time Nvidia has not yet has made any kind of formal announcement about it so far.
Still, I’m excited about the prospect of more lightning tracking games coming to the PC – now let’s just hope that AMD has its rival DLSS technology, FidelityFX Super Resolution, ready in time for when Resident Evil Village launches on May 7. , otherwise, there will be ‘I will be much more than just my stomach churning when Lady D starts chasing me through those super reflective corridors.