According to Capcom’s official system specifications:
Resident Evil Village (2021), developed by Capcom on the proprietary RE Engine, launched with native support for both DirectX 11 (DX11) and DirectX 12 (DX12). While the gaming industry was transitioning toward DX12 as the standard, the inclusion of DX11 was a strategic decision to ensure hardware compatibility and stability across a wider range of PC configurations. This paper analyzes the technical implementation of DX11 in Resident Evil Village , contrasting it with its DX12 counterpart, examining performance characteristics, and evaluating the visual fidelity trade-offs required to run the game on the older API.
Understanding why Capcom abandoned DX11 for Village requires examining the fundamental differences between the two APIs. resident evil village directx 11
Running in DX11 naturally disables Ray Tracing (RT), allowing you to achieve much higher overall FPS on mid-range cards. Performance Comparison: DX11 vs. DX12 (2026 Perspective)
Players of previous RE Engine games—like the Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3 Remakes—often look for a DX11 option under Steam's "Beta" settings tab. Fix DirectX Errors | Resident Evil Village Guide Understanding why Capcom abandoned DX11 for Village requires
DX12 shifts much of the GPU workload management from the driver to the game developer. While efficient, this causes . Every time you enter a new room in Castle Dimitrescu or step into the village square, your PC pauses for a split second to compile shaders. DirectX 11 handles this differently, often pre-compiling these assets.
Turn off Steam, Discord, or GeForce Experience overlays. DX12 (2026 Perspective) Players of previous RE Engine
Testing by community members (via YouTube benchmarks and forum posts) reveals:
There are two primary community methods to achieve a form of DX11 rendering:
By the time Resident Evil 3 was released, Capcom had made noticeable improvements. While DX11 still outperformed DX12 on both AMD and NVIDIA hardware, the performance gap was smaller. As one review concluded, “Capcom has clearly been working on their RE Engine‘s DirectX 12 support, but at this time, DirectX 11 will be the superior API for most gamers”.
Capcom’s RE Engine was heavily upgraded for Resident Evil Village to leverage low-level graphics APIs. Unlike DirectX 11, which handles multi-threading poorly, DirectX 12 allows the game engine to communicate directly with your CPU and GPU simultaneously.