Resident Evil 3 Remake PC Performance Analysis

Following in the footsteps of the very successful Resident Evil 2 Remake we see Nemesis and the rest of the crew follow and we dig into the Resident Evil 3 PC Performance from CPU cores, APIs, to graphics cards visual quality and resolution. Packing the same Reach For The Moon engine that powered the RE2 remake we are treated to improvements over that engine in this explosive follow up. If you're in search of a review of the game feel free to see what Nathan had to say about it in his review.

Resident Evil 3 Remake is another one of those fun titles to test, since it doesn't have a built-in utility. Because of this, we had to set up a benchmark course that was repeatable. Thankfully, just like when we looked at Devil May Cry V, I found a good long cutscene that performed in line with the other portions of the game I played through. Interestingly I later learned that it was the same as the opening cutscene usable in the game Demo. The test ran for 2 minutes using the Maximum preset. Much like RE:2 Remake, the game engine claims to call for much more VRAM than it will use while playing so it might be worth changing things around if you find performance a little iffy. Volumetric Lighting seems to be one of the most impactful settings in this one.

Once we had the results from 3 runs, after discarding an initial burner run for loading purposes, we took the average of average frame rates as well as the 99th percentile results from the run. We report our performance metrics as average frames per second and have moved away from the 1% and .1% reporting and are now using the 99th percentile. For those uncertain of what the 99th percentile is, representing is easily explained as showing only 1 frame out of 100 is slower than this frame rate. Put another way, 99% of the frames will achieve at least this frame rate.

Testing presets at 4K gives us a couple of quick metrics before diving into the game too deeply.  First off, it shows us how the game looks at various presets as well as how performance scales with those settings. Using the GeForce RTX 2080Ti you'll have no problems pushing past the 60 FPS target at 4K in this one, but if you move to the Graphics Priority you'll be hard pressed to see the difference other than being able to keep the game locked at over 60 FPS through your gameplay.

After implementing the 4K Preset Scaling test we found that 1080p scaling with a more appropriate card for that resolution would likely be beneficial as it's the more common resolutions and something like the RX 5500 XT was fairly middle of the road for that class of card. Once again we see that you can run this one without qualms. This was even with the 4GB variant of the RX 5500 XT and big red warning signs about limited VRAM capacity. But in gameplay we never saw it come an issue.

While this test won’t tell just how many cores and threads the game can and will use, it does show how the game performs as you move up in cores and threads available. These were tested at the 1080p settings that we tested the rest of the results while pairing the CPU with the RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition.  While this does not take into account the cache difference you would see with Intel CPUs as you move through their offering stack it does give us a better idea of how the game benefits and behaves from more cores and threads.

Resident Evil 3 Remake presented us an excellent opportunity to revisit the DX12 implementation for the engine. And just like with the RE2 Remake we found this one to simply run better in DX11 in our testing. That isn't the end of the story however, Mark at OC3D found instances in their testing that DX12 could be a benefit for those on lower performing and lower core count CPUs where it may be the bottleneck, check out his in depth look over here.

The only thing that is likely to run faster than Nemesis himself is going to be your system if you're running anything half way modern. In most cases you will be seeing cards running their intended gaming resolution breaking the 60 FPS target and if they're a little closer than you'd like to that you can easily eek out more performance by switching to the Graphics Priority settings. This will be one that I am looking to take to the Ryzen 5 3400G over the coming days if I get the time to and see how integrated graphics handle this one.

Resident Evil 3 Remake ups the ante on the graphical side and ramps up the action on the survival horror side, I've played for about 5 hours myself using my Ryzen 9 3900X and RTX 2080 combo on a 3440x1440 Nixeus EDG34 display and have been fully immersed in this one. If there's only one complaint that I have is there are still some audio quality issues here and I can't accurately test the HDR implementation in this one.