How to fix horrendous Resident Evil 7 performance on PC

I was banging my head against brick wall why the hell performance is so bad with this game. Don’t get me wrong, it looks reasonably nice and works great all maxed out, but it just shouldn’t run as bad when you walk into certain sections of map where it feels like it’s only 15fps for no logical reason. It’s even worse when some sections of levels work super fast one moment and when you reload the game, it’s lagging like insane. I’ve tried everything from monitoring my GPU clocks to even refreshing Windows 10 installation and nothing helped.

But later, fiddling with settings systematically and later talking to someone on TechPowerUp, I came to realization that game is indeed bugged. And for the dumbest reason.

The offending graphics setting appears to be “Shadow Cache”. Not really sure what’s the purpose of it to be quite honest. The thing is, this setting caches shadow maps into VRAM and if you “only” have 4GB like I do on my GTX 980, this game will run like absolute garbage because this cache is taking space in VRAM that needs to be there for other more important things than caching shadows data that works “on-the-fly” anyway just fine. At first I resolved it by changing Shadow Quality from Very High to High, but this appears to be even better solution. It runs just as fast while shading and shadows look way better. The Shadow cache is enabled by default even though it shouldn’t be. In fact I’m not even sure what’s the purpose of it. I mean, caches are usually there to speed things up. If it runs faster with it disabled, what does that tell to you?

Resident Evil 7 PC performance fix:

Set Shadow Cache to Off and crank everything else to the max. Wasted like half of the game ranting over idiotic garbage performance just because someone didn’t do his job in QA department. It’s unacceptable and stupid that gamers, who are suppose to enjoy this thing, we have to dissect it instead and figure it out why it’s broken. Ugh.

Well, at least now I’ll be able to enjoy it a lot better… Stupid Shadow Cache…

Bioshock Trilogy remaster coming fall 2016!

As you may or may have not heard about it, Bioshock trilogy is getting remastered including all add-ons, expansions and DLC’s and it will arrive in early September 2016.

Only game out of three that won’t be remastered is Bioshock Infinite because developers believe it already meets today’s standards of quality expected from modern games on modern gaming systems. This means proper wide screen support, 1080p and 60fps. I hope They’ll also include FOV fixes because that crap was stupid even for Bioshock Infinite. I had to hack it to get higher FOV. So, there’s that…

IMPORTANT!

One important fact though for PC gamers, if you have Bioshock 1, Bioshock 2 with Minerva’s Den DLC and Bioshock Infinite listed in your Steam library, you’ll be eligible for free remastered update that will otherwise cost around 60€ as a standalone package on release day.

What this means is, if you have retail copy of Bioshock 2 you can add it to Steam library (just enter the CD KEY into Steam). Bioshock 1 can’t be added and you probably already have Infinite on Steam since I think it was only released there anyway or at least most bought it there. You can grab Bioshock 1 cheap on Steam till 4th July 2016 during summer sales. So, you can greatly reduce the total cost if you act fast! If you don’t own any of them, you can buy all 3 for around 15€ which is still very cheap. Again, just till 4th July 2016 during Summer Steam sale!

I’ve already prepared all 3 games on my Steam account and I’ll just give away the retail one to my younger cousin. I guess it’s time to introduce him to a world of a bit more complex games 🙂