Resident Evil Village gives you two chances for higher frame rates in one little patch

Lady Dimitrescu captures Ethan
(Image credit: Capcom)

Resident Evil Village has today received a double whammy patch, with a pair of big updates for Capcom's creepy tale of woe and hand mutilation. The first is that AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution feature is now available in the game's settings—as promised last week—and the second is that its anti-piracy related stuttering should now be a thing of the past.

Both are very much positive steps for the latest Resi, with FSR able to boost your in-game frame rates by using spatial upscaling and sharpening to take a lower resolution input and make it look almost as good as native, but with a hefty frame rate uplift. We've tested FSR ourselves in its few launch titles and it works brilliantly. 

It's not quite AMD's DLSS, but it's a free performance bump for only a tiny hit in terms of overall fidelity.

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While FSR can make a difference to your general gaming frame rates, it's the updates to Resi's implementation of its Denuvo anti-piracy plugin that could make a bigger difference to your actual playing experience. And, strangely, it's probably thanks to Resident Evil Village pirates that we've got this patch at all.

Testing on the cracked, DRM-free version versus the release version showed a regular stuttering in frame rates on the official game. The cracked Resi, however, was smooth as a pool of blood forming below Ethan's regularly mangled hand.

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It was widely held that this stuttering was down to Denuvo itself, but the company told us that its software has nothing to do with the performance problems of Resi, and that it couldn't comment "specifically on the Capcom implementations as they are unrelated to Denuvo's solution."

Capcom has now made adjustments to optimise the anti-piracy technology, and this should have fixed any stuttering issues. It also suggests that the problems were very much at Capcom's end. 

Whatever the rights and wrongs, however, that means whether or not you decide to take the plunge with AMD's FSR this patch will deliver a finer Resident Evil Village experience.

Just like all good patches should.

Dave James
Managing Editor, Hardware

Dave has been gaming since the days of Zaxxon and Lady Bug on the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and finally finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year later. When he dropped it out of the window. He first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many decades ago, then moved onto PC Format full-time, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Now he's back, writing about the nightmarish graphics card market, CPUs with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck.