Resident Evil 9 ray tracing looks damn fine with a powerful Nvidia GeForce GPU

Prepare to return to the hellish world of Raccoon City in Resident Evil 9 with ultra-realistic lighting, as long as you have a really powerful new Nvidia GeForce graphics card. Nvidia has confirmed that the new Resident Evil 9 Requiem will support DLSS 4 and path tracing, an advanced form of ray tracing, when the game launches next year, but you'll probably need a top-spec GPU to make it playable.

Path tracing is a seriously impressive upgrade to regular ray tracing that can make games look ultra-realistic, but it takes a lot of GPU firepower to make it work, with top-spec Nvidia GPUs, such as those in our best graphics card guide, best-suited to the challenge. In our Doom The Dark Ages path tracing testing, for example, only an RTX 5080 or better could play that GPU-intensive game with path tracing at 1080p with decent frame rates, while AMD's latest GPUs really struggle with it, and we're not expecting Resident Evil Requiem to be that different.

This news was among several pre-Gamescom details that Nvidia released on August 18. According to Nvidia, this new survival horror sequel will include full DLSS 4 support, as well as path tracing. The game will render shadows from a number of light sources, with realistic effects such as reflections and refractions through glass, along with more natural lighting.

All of this will hopefully make the game seem much more realistic to play, but it's a huge drain on your GPU to make path tracing work. As our Doom The Dark Ages testing proved, 1080p is the high water mark for path tracing at the moment, with our data even showing that top-spec GPUs such as the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 require DLSS to hit over 60fps consistently, at least without using frame gen.

Nvidia's recent GeForce On video showcased how impressive this tech looks in practice. For example, with path tracing on, you can see the character's reflection in the window, and the text from her screen reflected in her glasses, along with the lights flickering as she moves - both ultra-realistic elements that you don't see with the feature switched off.

Ultra-realism is what we all want in a Resident Evil game, so if you've got a gaming PC with a top-spec Nvidia graphics card, you should be able to push it to its limits. Capcom hasn't released the Resident Evil Requiem system requirements just yet, but Nvidia's video does mention that efforts are being made to get the game to run on entry-level PC specs. If that's the case, we'll be hoping that the average gamer will still be able to play, even if they don't enable path tracing.

With the Resident Evil 9 release date set for February 2026, we've got a few months to prepare our rigs until it launches. You can check out our best gaming PC guide next if you want to upgrade to a new rig that can handle path tracing.

If you've got your own path tracing experiences to share, our Discord server is a great place to do it, with staff and readers alike ready to join the discussion.