Resident Evil 9 Best PC Settings: The One Setting That Costs You the Most FPS

Resident Evil 9 — officially Resident Evil Requiem — runs great on PC once you know which single setting is doing all the damage. It’s ray tracing, and specifically path tracing, and the FPS gap it creates is bigger than almost anything else in the settings menu. In one 4K benchmark run on an RTX 4090, switching from no ray tracing to Ray Tracing Normal/High dropped frame rate from roughly 109fps to 78fps — a 28% hit for one toggle [4]. In the same test, enabling full path tracing natively on an RTX 5090 fell to 24-27fps before any upscaling was applied [4]. Everything else in this guide is fine-tuning around that one decision.

This guide breaks down exactly what to change, why each setting costs what it costs, and which combination fits your GPU — whether that’s a five-year-old GTX 1660 or a fresh RTX 5090. For general Windows and driver-level tuning that applies to every game you own, see our guide to optimizing your PC for better FPS first, then come back here for the Requiem-specific settings.

Quick Start: Change These 8 Settings First

Before touching anything else, set these — they cover most of the FPS ceiling with almost no visual sacrifice at typical viewing distances:

1. Ray Tracing: Off (unless you’re on RTX 40/50-series and specifically want the look — see below)
2. Motion Blur: Off — pure performance cost, no gameplay benefit
3. Hair Strands: Off below 8GB VRAM, Normal at 10GB+ [4]
4. Texture Quality: Normal (watch the in-game VRAM bar before raising it) [3][4]
5. Mesh Quality: Standard/Low — a raycasting/geometry cost with minimal visible payoff [3][6]
6. Anisotropic Filtering: x16 — essentially free, sharpens textures at oblique angles [4]
7. Upscaling (DLSS/FSR): Quality mode as your starting point [3][6]
8. NVIDIA Reflex: On + Boost if you have an NVIDIA GPU — cuts input latency by up to 46% in this game with no FPS cost [1]

Why Ray Tracing Costs So Much (And When It’s Worth It)

Ray tracing in Requiem replaces baked, rasterized ambient occlusion and screen-space reflections with actual traced light rays that bounce around the scene in real time. Screen-space reflections only know what’s already visible on your screen; ray tracing calculates what should physically be there, including things off-screen — which is why wet floors and glass in Requiem look correct instead of glitchy under RT, but it’s also why the GPU has to do dramatically more math per frame [1].

Path tracing goes further: instead of tracing a handful of rays per pixel for specific effects, it simulates a wide range of full light paths for the entire scene, which is why it needs AI denoising (DLSS Ray Reconstruction) just to look clean at a playable frame rate — the raw output has too much noise otherwise [1]. That’s also why path tracing is effectively locked to RTX 40/50-series cards, since Ray Reconstruction is an RTX-specific AI feature; AMD’s FSR upscaler is not compatible with Requiem’s path tracing mode [4].

The decision tree is simple:

• RTX 4070 or below, or any AMD/older GPU: Leave ray tracing off. The image-quality gain doesn’t clear the FPS cost at these tiers, and path tracing isn’t available on non-RTX-Reconstruction cards anyway.
• RTX 4080/4090, want the best possible look, don’t mind relying on upscaling: Try Ray Tracing Normal first. Only move to full path tracing if you’re prepared to run DLSS Performance mode plus Multi Frame Generation to claw back playable frame rates [1][4].
• RTX 5080/5090: Path tracing plus DLSS 4 with 4x Multi Frame Generation is the one combination where this actually holds up — NVIDIA’s own benchmarks show over 280fps at 4K on a 5090 with everything maxed, because Multi Frame Generation is generating three AI frames for every one the GPU actually renders [1].

One honest caveat: those 280fps-plus numbers are interpolated frames, not fully game-engine-rendered ones. If you’re playing something reflex-dependent, treat that number as a smoothness metric, not a true input-response metric — which is exactly why Reflex (a real, non-interpolated latency fix) matters more here than in most games [1].

Best Settings by Player Type

“Best” depends entirely on what you’re optimizing for. Identical advice for every player is bad advice — here’s where the tradeoffs actually differ:

The takeaway: only the visual-showcase tier should be spending frame budget on ray tracing at all — everyone else gets more real performance from the settings in the Quick Start list above than from any lighting toggle.

Settings by GPU Tier

Matching your hardware to a realistic target beats chasing a universal “best” preset. This table synthesizes the vendor benchmark data and community testing above [1][3][4] into GPU tiers:

If you’re unsure which bracket you’re in or want a deeper breakdown of what your card can realistically push at each resolution, our GPU-to-resolution guide covers the general framework this table applies to Requiem specifically.

DLSS 4, Frame Generation, and When Not to Use It

DLSS 4’s Multi Frame Generation is the reason the RTX 5090’s path-tracing numbers look so different from the RTX 4090’s. Instead of generating one AI frame between two rendered ones (the older DLSS 3 approach), Multi Frame Generation inserts up to three AI-generated frames per traditionally rendered frame [1]. That’s a real, useful tool — but it has one hard rule that most in-game FPS counters don’t warn you about: never turn on Frame Generation to fix an already-unstable frame rate. If your base (pre-Frame-Gen) FPS is dropping into the 30s, Frame Generation amplifies that stutter instead of hiding it — it should only be layered on top of an already-stable 60fps+ baseline [5].

If you’re deciding between DLSS, FSR, and XeSS for your specific card, or want the deeper technical difference between the two frame-generation approaches, our DLSS vs FSR vs XeSS comparison and DLSS 4 frame generation breakdown cover ground this guide doesn’t need to repeat.

NVIDIA Reflex vs. Just Leaving It Off

Reflex is the one setting on this list with no real downside on NVIDIA hardware — NVIDIA measured a 46% cut to system latency in Requiem specifically [1], and unlike Frame Generation, it doesn’t touch image quality or introduce interpolation artifacts. Boost mode pushes the GPU to run slightly ahead of its power curve to shave a few more milliseconds; it’s worth trying, but if you notice coil whine or thermal throttling on a laptop, drop back to standard Reflex. If you’re on AMD, the closest equivalent is Anti-Lag — see our Anti-Lag vs. Reflex comparison for how the two actually compare rather than just trusting the marketing.

VRAM: The Setting That Silently Wrecks Frame Pacing

Hair Strands is the setting most likely to blow your VRAM budget without an obvious warning. Community testing found Requiem needs roughly 6GB just for Hair Strands off at Normal texture settings, but High Hair Strands wants 12GB+ before it stops causing traversal stutter as new hair-rendering data streams in [4]. If you’re running an 8GB card, this is worth more attention than ray tracing — a VRAM overflow causes stutter that no amount of GPU horsepower fixes, because the bottleneck has moved to your PCIe bus. If 8GB feels tight for a 2026 release, our 8GB VRAM guide and VRAM allocation guide go deeper on diagnosing this specifically.

Verified against the build current as of September 2026 (Requiem launched February 27, 2026, on Windows 11/DirectX 12 with Denuvo anti-tamper protection [2]). Capcom has shipped stability and DualSense patches since launch; specific FPS figures may shift a few percentage points with future driver or game updates, but the underlying settings hierarchy — ray tracing costs the most, Reflex costs nothing — is stable across the patches so far.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is ray tracing worth turning on in Resident Evil 9?

Only if you’re on an RTX 4080 or better and are willing to lean on DLSS to get the frame rate back. Below that tier, a FPS cost in the region of 28% or more (per benchmark testing) buys you reflections and shadow detail most players won’t notice mid-combat — the frame rate loss is far more noticeable than the visual gain [4].

Why is my FPS lower than the benchmarks I’ve seen online?

Most published benchmarks use top-tier CPUs (like a Ryzen 7 9800X3D) paired with flagship GPUs [3] — if your CPU is a bottleneck, no graphics setting will close that gap, since CPU load in Requiem comes from AI, physics, and Denuvo’s anti-tamper checks running independently of your resolution or texture settings. Check your CPU usage in Task Manager during a demanding scene before assuming a GPU setting is at fault.

Should I use Variable frame rate or a fixed cap?

Use a fixed cap unless you have a high-refresh VRR display and consistently exceed your monitor’s ceiling. Variable frame rate lets FPS swing with scene complexity, which feels worse than a slightly lower but locked number — frame time consistency matters more to perceived smoothness than the peak FPS figure [5][6].

Do I need an SSD for Resident Evil 9?

Yes — it’s a listed requirement, not a suggestion. Requiem streams high-resolution textures and hair/geometry data continuously during exploration; running it from a mechanical hard drive causes texture pop-in and stutter that no graphics setting can fix, because the bottleneck is storage read speed, not GPU rendering.

Sources

1. NVIDIA. Resident Evil Requiem Available Now, Featuring Path Tracing, DLSS 4 With Multi Frame Generation & DLSS Ray Reconstruction. GeForce News
2. DSOGaming. Resident Evil Requiem PC Requirements Revealed, Denuvo Confirmed
3. PCGamesN. Best Resident Evil Requiem Settings for PC and Steam Deck
4. DropReference. Resident Evil Requiem PC: Optimal Graphic Settings Guide 2026
5. Hone. Best Resident Evil Requiem Setting for FPS
6. RTX50Series.co.uk. Best Resident Evil Requiem Graphics Settings (High FPS + Great Visuals)

Michael R.

I've been playing video games for over 20 years, spanning everything from early PC titles to modern open-world games. I started Switchblade Gaming to publish the kind of accurate, well-researched guides I always wanted to find — built on primary sources, tested in-game, and kept up to date after patches. I currently focus on Minecraft and Pokémon GO.