The performance issues in Resident Evil Village have been fixed, but there is no excuse

Japanese developers and publishers Capcom released Resident Evil Village in early May this year. Despite high ratings from most reviewers, the launch has been smashed in the cup due to performance issues on a specific PC, the cause of which was only discovered when the game’s DRM protection was cracked in early July by the group Empress.

The game uses a combination of controversial Denuvo and Capcom’s own copy protection, which is nestled in the former. According to the group that cracked the game, copy protection controls were activated during certain types of input into the game, which could drastically degrade performance.

All in-game shutters like the one from when you kill a zombie are fixed because Capcom DRM’s entry points are patched out so most of their functions are never executed anymore. This results in a much smoother game experience.

– The crack group Empress

Digital Foundry tested the game with removed DRM protection, and could very well state that the performance issues are blown away. And now, 72 days since the game was launched, Capcom has also taken its senses to fix the problem with an official update to the game.

Apparently, the update has the same effect as the previous crack, but Capcom does not share details about whether they have completely removed their own copy protection or what actually happened. No apology from Capcom is offered either, despite the fact that the majority of the game’s buyers have already played through the game already, despite the performance problems.

Despite the lack of an apology, the update offers other more positive news. At the same time, Capcom has taken the opportunity to add support for the Fidelity FX Super Resolution (FSR) in the AMD-sponsored title. This puts Digital Foundry to the test and compares with the game’s built-in upscaling technology.

FSR is expected to offer relatively small performance improvements, something Digital Foundry’s editor attributes to bottlenecks that potentially arise due to ray tracing. Game built-in checkerboardrendering is judged to provide significantly better performance and retain more richness of detail, but in turn suffers from more artifacts in the rendered image. This means that FSR is still considered to be the better alternative.

Have you played Resident Evil Village and if so, did you notice any performance issues?