A couple of months after the release of Resident Evil Requiem and just a day before the release of Pragmata—the first RE Engine games to support path tracing—Capcom and Nvidia have published an hour-long talk at GDC discussing how they built the advanced feature into RE Engine. The talk is available in video form, which you can check out below, and features Capcom’s Hitoshi Mishima and Nvidia’s Calvin Hsu.
Mishima and Hsu revealed that the implementation of path tracing directly into RE Engine was handled by Capcom’s Kenta Nakamoto and Kosuke Nabata, and that it took them a year and a half to accomplish. The system seemingly makes use of Nvidia’s DLSS Ray Reconstruction technology to help with denoising, and was noted as being important to make sure that real-time performance was acceptable. Unfortunately, this also had the side-effect of making path tracing in Resident Evil Requiem and Pragmata exclusive to Nvidia’s RTX graphics cards.
The speakers also noted that a number of design choices were made so that Capcom could make use of streaming RIS, which could pick the most important light sources to which path tracing could be applied, all while remaining efficient. These design decisions include the compensation of brightness so that scenes with spotlight-based lighting wouldn’t suffer from darkening artifacts, the use of Lambertian diffuse with single-lobe specular instead of the full bidirectional scattering distribution function (BSDF), the exclusion of image-based lighting, and the addition of emissive polygons.
As for DLSS Ray Reconstruction, Capcom made use of the technology to fix visual artifacts that could arise from subsurface scattering, frosty and blurry glass surfaces, and refracting surfaces like raindrops, among other things.
Leading up to their respective releases, both Resident Evil Requiem and Pragmata got trailers for their PC versions, showcasing how path tracing could bring in massive changes to scenes thanks to more realistic lighting that was only possible using RTX graphics cards. Along with this, the trailers also made sure to showcase other RTX-related benefits, including DLSS 4 and its Multi Frame Generation, which could help boost frame rates by making the GPU generate extra frames between the game’s own outputs.
As for other qualities of the games, both Resident Evil Requiem and Pragmata have been reviewed quite positively, which means that Capcom has been on quite a solid run when it comes to releasing high-quality games. Resident Evil Requiem is available on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch 2. Pragmata is slated for release later this week—on April 17th—on the same platforms.
While you wait for the release of Pragmata, take a look at its most recent trailer, where Capcom showcased how protagonist Hugh can make use of his arsenal of weapons alongside android Diana as they make their way through The Cradle. The default weapon available to Hugh is the Grip Gun, which essentially acts as a pistol of sorts. When it’s time to deal more damage, however, Hugh can get his hands on the Shockwave Blaster, for example, which can help him attack multiple foes at the same time.
However, it is worth remembering that Hugh’s weapons aren’t the only thing you’ll need to use. Enemies in Pragmata have high defences, and you will need to make use of Diana’s hacking abilities to make them lower their guard.