Topic on Talk:Resident Evil 4 (2023)

Once you arrive at the village (after passing the church) the fps will drop massively in that area (happens on all platforms (PC & Consoles). due to the particles (rain, wind, etc) and the amount of NPCs (enemies) that are present at that moment. To fix this you have 3 options (Only PC):

1. Altabbing the game (game clears any unused asset in the vram giving you around 1gb free more vram whenever you alt+tab the game, this can be a good fix for people with 4,6 or even 8gb of vram depending on selected graphics settings)

2. Pausing the game (after pausing the game for 5 seconds the performance becomes stable)

3. Opening the case (if the 2nd solution doesn't works, you can try this as well)

Source from these issues (BenchmarKing & Digital Foundry): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMHLeHN4kYg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eS3De-wiPfA

Can't remember the DF video mentioning anything about this specific FPS-issue. Seems to be here again indeed a bad VRAM management issue that should be fixed, but also, recommended of course to not run the game at settings your VRAM isn't made to handle to generally avoid these issues.

People in the comments mentioned this issue, in the video DF said he only completed the first few chapters but didn't arrived to that part.

I have a rtx 3060 and my vram preset uses less than 4gb plus i have Intel core i5 12th, you can find any video during that specific part the fps drops A LOT

Ahhhh, ok, so DF themselves didn't mention it; explains why I didn't hear about it. With "vram preset" you mean the in-game texture setting? You checked that it actually stayed under 4 GB usage of VRAM? RTX 3060 should have 12 GB of VRAM right....

What are your system specs btw?

Core i5 12450H (8 cores, 12 threads) Rtx 3060 16gb ddr5 ram SSD NVMe (3.5gb/s speed) Latest Nvidia drivers (531.41)

My graphics Preset uses less than 4gb of vram and this issue happens on any platform.

Tried to improve your recent additions a bit, it was missing sources and proper fixboxes, and had some wording/grammar mistakes in it. Hopefully it looks better now and more according to the editing guidelines (https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/PCGamingWiki:Editing_guide). Would advice you though to add sources to your claims on the PCGW pages to make things more clear and reliable.

Thank you, next gen i will list the problems on discussion and wait for someone to add them on the page

Also ok to discuss it first, sur, but please don't forget to add better and clearer explanations of the issues when adding them to the PCGW page with proper references to back up claims that are made :)

Also, your regularly referring to BenchmarKing's videos, but only a single source with, admittedly, mid-range hardware for this time, is maybe not very reliable to make definitive inclusions with. What timestamp in the BenchmarkKing video did you see this issue occur? As mentioned on the PCGW page, I'm actually doubting if this is really an issue and not just a more heavy section of the game because of the particles and many NPCs. When visiting the village before rescuing Abby, is the FPS then somehow much better? Sorry, this is very unclear to me.

I confirm that it happens to me with an rx 6600 (8 GB vram card) with particles and rain on low. "Alt-tabbing", pausing the game and opening the case dont work for me, the game gradually becomes stable somehow after some time.

Thanks for testing DarkSonicPT; isn't the only real workaround for this thus to just lower settings to force VRAM to keep itself in check? Assuming this is a VRAM issue... from the workarounds jpgmafia described at least. But darksonic, can you better describe the issue for me? Especially regarding my previous question "When visiting the village before rescuing Abby, is the FPS then somehow much better?" That is still very unclear to me as to why is this only an issue when re-visiting the village, assuming thus that this is the case? Sorry, the wording of it all is very unclear to me.

The first and second visit to the village, the game runs as it should. After rescuing ashley in the church, leon and her need to head to the village (this is the third visit to the village by leon) and when they enter the village, the performance tanks. I will post more information when i revisit the place.

What is the FPS difference between the first/second and third visit? What is the main differences visually between these visits? More NPC's or what? Please be as detailed as possible. Because this is now still quite unclear and makes the issue on the PCGW page also harder to understand. As it now just sounds to me that they maybe added more NPCs and some different weather effects, just being a bit heavier on the system than usual instead of it being a real issue....

I need to test that area again to comment further.

That part is heavily cpu bound but at the same time it's horribly optimized, i have completed the game 4 times already and that specific pRt is when fps drops so hard

Correct, i have an octa-core multithreaded cpu and the game fails to use all the available cores. Capcom still doesnt know how to proper optimize cpu tasks, this also happens on other re engine titles, sadly.

In Capcom's defense: many game engines only utilize like 2-6 threads maybe.... so they are not a big exception here. But are you sure it is the CPU that is thus the bottleneck in this situation? Did you measure usage with RTSS or something to really measure this?

No, they are an exception, what you said is true to engines from around 10 years ago. Most modern engines are capable of using at least 8 cores and know how to multithread right, some examples: luminous, decima, redengine 4, forzatech, id tech, even the naughty dog engine (tlou is heavy yes but the software knows how to multithread at least), and so on. The re engine is pretty good overall but when it comes to cpu load distribution, it's a disgrace. Regarding the village scenario, the cpu is not the problem, even with the few cores it uses, they didnt reach 100%.

It is mostly an opinion regarding multithreading being in many engines now or not haha, but what we both really want is of course engines to be properly multithreaded. So, the CPU is not the limiting factor here, thus lowering graphics related settings should thus help, right? Can you test this?

yes i can, it will take a while

No rush, all the time in the world :)

Does perhaps disabling RT fix your issues? Or just turning down graphics settings in the game.... Because to me this still just sounds like a heavier scene instead of an issue. If you would turn down settings to lowest settings, does the third visit to the town then still show the large FPS drop? What number difference do you see then? This rules out for certain the GPU being a bottleneck and the CPU then being the cause as you two suspect.

Also, as DarkSonicPT said, alt-tabbing and pausing the game did not help. Are you sure it did help for you jpgmafia? As, as I mentioned on the PCGW page itself, these workarounds sound quite sketchy to me and unlikely to help for more than a minute, especially the alt-tabbing one. The pausing-workaround seems extremely unlikely to help honestly.... Can someone shed some light on this?

Almost inclined to remove this issue temporarily from the page till things are tested again and determined if this is a real game issue or just a scene being more heavy because of more NPCs, graphical effects etc. Would jpgmafia and DarkSonicPT agree with that or rather not? :)

I can confirm that this happened to me as well, even while streaming the game using OBS.

I think within the last 30 minutes or so, I save Ashley and go to the village where it's raining. The performance drops and OBS starts to struggle as well.

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1781252557

Specs: Windows 11 Professional, Launcher--Steam, CPU--AMD Ryzen 9 3900X, GPU--NVIDIA RTX 2070S 8GB GDDR5, RAM--2x8GB DDR4 @ 3200MHz

So, from gameplay I see, the weather effects (the fire effect in the middle and its lighting, but especially the wind particles in particular) just make the scene more heavy to run the third time you visit this location right? Would then again thus just think that this scene is just a bit more graphically heavy compared to previous visits of this scene. So, highly question if this is a real issue or just a bit more demanding scene.... probably requiring the user to lower the settings maybe a tat? With "issue" I mean: something that is clearly wrong for no good explainable reason... but here there seems to be a reason (the extra graphical effects and adjusted more heavy lighting). Especially at higher settings, users should expect in games that one level can sometimes have lower performance than the other right? What makes this case of that so unusual to you guys? (not sarcastic, really asking you why you are considering this an issue)

The latest patch fixed this for me. I tried to replicate the problem by reloading the game several times and not once did it occur, i think it's safe to say: the issue has been resolved. The patch also fixed the out of memory problem i had when using ray tracing, now the game doesn't crash anymore.