Gaming: I've Tested Resident Evil Requiem With Different GPU And Different...

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When I blasted through Resident Evil Requiem over the course of one blood-spattered weekend, I thought Capcom's latest looked great—though I did play it on a PS5. Turns out, on PC, your zombie mashing mileage may vary due to Nvidia driver shenanigans.

Unhappy PC gamers took to Reddit earlier this week, claiming to have seen a significant drop in performance while playing Resi with the GeForce Game Ready Driver 591.86 installed. One Redditor gaming on an RTX 40-series GPU reported a drop to 74 fps, and even a dip in average GPU power draw to 304 W while path tracing was enabled.

The suggested fix? Rolling back to an older driver. Multiple RTX 40-series gamers in the same thread reported a significant gain in frames and power draw with this one weird trick. So, I had to test it for myself.

But before I properly get into it, a little more context: it was hoped that the driver update released on March 2, 595.71, would address some of this wonkiness. Unfortunately, this is still causing up to a 16% drop in performance for some on even 50-series cards (via Bang4BuckPC Gamer).

This all comes after Nvidia released GeForce driver 595.59, and then unreleased it last month after reports of graphics card fan outages and clock speed issues. This whole driver drama has drawn no small amount of ire from the community, which has undoubtedly been emboldened in its critique by recent comments from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang suggesting that nothing would give him more joy than if none of his software engineers were coding.

The plot only thickened when I took to the PC Gamer test bench myself. First things first, I made sure to use Display Driver Uninstaller to blitz any GPU drivers on the machine. I would install my chosen driver, test, remove it with DDU, and then repeat.

For those curious, the hardware team's test bench is built on a Gigabyte X870E Aorus Master motherboard, with an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPU, and enjoys 64 GB of DDR5 RAM.

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As for game settings within Resident Evil Requiem, I switched on path tracing and my resolution to 1920 x 1080. I also set graphics, lighting and shadow quality to max, set the upscaling mode to 'Performance', and kicked up Nvidia Frame Generation to '2x'. All in order to match the settings presented by one Redditor impacted by the issue.

Source: PC Gamer