Resident Evil 3 Remake PC Performance Analysis

Following in the footsteps of the very successful Resident Evil 2 Remake we see Nemesis and the rest of the crew follow and we dig into the Resident Evil 3 PC Performance from CPU cores, APIs, to graphics cards visual quality and resolution. Packing the same Reach For The Moon engine that powered the RE2 remake we are treated to improvements over that engine in this explosive follow up. If you're in search of a review of the game feel free to see what Nathan had to say about it in his review.

Minimum System Requirements

• Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
• OS: WINDOWS® 7, 8.1, 10 (64-BIT Required)
• Processor: Intel® Core™ i5-4460 or AMD FX™-6300 or better
• Memory: 8 GB RAM
• Graphics: NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 760 or AMD Radeon™ R7 260x with 2GB Video RAM
• DirectX: Version 11

Testing Methodology

Resident Evil 3 Remake is another one of those fun titles to test, since it doesn't have a built-in utility. Because of this, we had to set up a benchmark course that was repeatable. Thankfully, just like when we looked at Devil May Cry V, I found a good long cutscene that performed in line with the other portions of the game I played through. Interestingly I later learned that it was the same as the opening cutscene usable in the game Demo. The test ran for 2 minutes using the Maximum preset. Much like RE:2 Remake, the game engine claims to call for much more VRAM than it will use while playing so it might be worth changing things around if you find performance a little iffy. Volumetric Lighting seems to be one of the most impactful settings in this one.

Once we had the results from 3 runs, after discarding an initial burner run for loading purposes, we took the average of average frame rates as well as the 99th percentile results from the run. We report our performance metrics as average frames per second and have moved away from the 1% and .1% reporting and are now using the 99th percentile. For those uncertain of what the 99th percentile is, representing is easily explained as showing only 1 frame out of 100 is slower than this frame rate. Put another way, 99% of the frames will achieve at least this frame rate.

Test System

Components	Z370
CPU	Intel Core i9-9900k @ 5GHz
Memory	32GB Mushkin Redline DDR4 3600
Motherboard	EVGA Z370 Classified K
Storage	Kingston KC2000 1TB NVMe SSD
PSU	Cooler Master V1200 Platinum
Windows Version	Latest verion of windows at the time of testing
Hardware-Accelerated GPU Scheduling	On if supported by GPU and driver.

Graphics Cards Tested

GPU	Architecture	Core Count	Clock Speed	Memory Capacity	Memory Speed
NVIDIA RTX 2080ti FE	Turing	4352	1350/1635	11GB GDDR6	14Gbps
NVIDIA RTX 2080 SUPER FE	Turing	3072	1650/1815	8GB GDDR6	15.5Gbps
NVIDIA RTX 2070 SUPER FE	Turing	2560	1605/1770	8GB GDDR6	14Gbps
NVIDIA RTX 2060 SUPER	Turing	2176	1470/1650	8GB GDDR6	14Gbps
NVIDIA RTX 2060 FE	Turing	1904	1365/168	6GB GDDR6	14Gbps
ZOTAC Gaming GTX 1660	Turing	1408	1530/1785	6GB GDDR5	8Gbps
ZOTAC GTX 1650 SUPER	Turing	1280	1530/1725	4GB GDDR6	12Gbps
NVIDIA GTX 1080 FE	Pascal	2560	1607/1733	8GB GDDR5X	10Gbps
NVIDIA GTX 1070 FE	Pascal	1920	1506/1683	8GB GDDR5	8Gbps
NVIDIA GTX 1060 FE 6GB	Pascal	1280	1506/1708	6GB GDDR5	8Gbps
AMD Radeon RX 5700XT	Navi 10	2560	1605/1755/1905	8GB GDDR6	14Gbps
AMD Radeon RX 5700	Navi 10	2304	1465/1625/1725	8GB GDDR6	14Gbps
Sapphire RX 5600 XT	Navi 10	2304	1130/1660/1750	6GB GDDR6	14Gbps
AMD RX Vega 64	Vega 10	4096	1247/1546	8GB HBM2	945Mbps
AMD RX Vega 56	Vega 10	3584	1156/1471	8GB HBM2	800Mbs
Sapphire RX 5500 XT 4GB	Navi 14	1408	1737/1845	4GB GDDR6	14Gbps
MSI RX 580 Armor 8GB	Polaris 20	2304	1366	8GB GDDR5	8Gbps
Sapphire Nitro+ RX 570 4GB	Polaris 20	2048	1340	4GB GDDR5	7Gbps

Drivers Used

Drivers
Radeon Settings	20.4.1
GeForce	445.75

Preset Scaling At 4K

Testing presets at 4K gives us a couple of quick metrics before diving into the game too deeply.  First off, it shows us how the game looks at various presets as well as how performance scales with those settings. Using the GeForce RTX 2080Ti you'll have no problems pushing past the 60 FPS target at 4K in this one, but if you move to the Graphics Priority you'll be hard pressed to see the difference other than being able to keep the game locked at over 60 FPS through your gameplay.

Preset Scaling At 1080p

After implementing the 4K Preset Scaling test we found that 1080p scaling with a more appropriate card for that resolution would likely be beneficial as it's the more common resolutions and something like the RX 5500 XT was fairly middle of the road for that class of card. Once again we see that you can run this one without qualms. This was even with the 4GB variant of the RX 5500 XT and big red warning signs about limited VRAM capacity. But in gameplay we never saw it come an issue.

Intel Core Scaling Performance With DX11 vs DX12

While this test won’t tell just how many cores and threads the game can and will use, it does show how the game performs as you move up in cores and threads available. These were tested at the 1080p settings that we tested the rest of the results while pairing the CPU with the RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition.  While this does not take into account the cache difference you would see with Intel CPUs as you move through their offering stack it does give us a better idea of how the game benefits and behaves from more cores and threads.

Resident Evil 3 Remake presented us an excellent opportunity to revisit the DX12 implementation for the engine. And just like with the RE2 Remake we found this one to simply run better in DX11 in our testing. That isn't the end of the story however, Mark at OC3D found instances in their testing that DX12 could be a benefit for those on lower performing and lower core count CPUs where it may be the bottleneck, check out his in depth look over here.

Graphics Card Results

1080p

Ultrawide 1080p

1440p

Ultrawide 1440p

UHD 4K

Conclusion

The only thing that is likely to run faster than Nemesis himself is going to be your system if you're running anything half way modern. In most cases you will be seeing cards running their intended gaming resolution breaking the 60 FPS target and if they're a little closer than you'd like to that you can easily eek out more performance by switching to the Graphics Priority settings. This will be one that I am looking to take to the Ryzen 5 3400G over the coming days if I get the time to and see how integrated graphics handle this one.

Resident Evil 3 Remake ups the ante on the graphical side and ramps up the action on the survival horror side, I've played for about 5 hours myself using my Ryzen 9 3900X and RTX 2080 combo on a 3440x1440 Nixeus EDG34 display and have been fully immersed in this one. If there's only one complaint that I have is there are still some audio quality issues here and I can't accurately test the HDR implementation in this one.