The Resident Evil 2 PC upgrade will bring it, along with Resident Evil 3 and Resident Evil 7, in line with current-gen consoles by adding ray tracing and other enhancements – but it’s also changing the system requirements. After the patch goes live, the survival horror game will no longer support DirectX 11 drivers and will only be playable on DirectX 12, Capcom said in a short update on Steam.
It will tweak a few other system requirements as well. The minimum specifications will no longer include Windows 7 and 8.1 (64 bit). You’ll need Windows 10 (64 bit) or Windows 11. Resident Evil 2 currently supports Nvidia GeForce GTX 760 and AMD Radeon R7 260x, but after the update, you need at least GeForce GTX 960 or AMD Radeon RX 460.
Capcom gave no indication when it expects the update to go live, but some eagle-eyed internet users have already spotted the franchise’s updates on Sony’s servers. It’s caused a bit of speculation that they may arrive sometime after the publisher’s June 13 summer showcase.
Previously, Capcom said the PC updates that will bring “cutting-edge features including ray tracing, high frame rate and 3D audio” are planned to release sometime after the console patches launch.
The enhancements are what Capcom already implemented in Resident Evil Village on PC, and it’s probably not the last time we’ll see a Resident Evil game with higher minimum specs either.
Resident Evil 4 Remake is being developed exclusively for next-gen hardware, which means the PC requirements will probably be a fair bit higher as well.
So far, there’s no word yet whether Resident Evil 3 Remake and Resident Evil 7’s specs are also changing.
And of course, if you’re playing on Steam Deck, then the spec changes won’t matter, though early indications are that Resident Evil isn’t among the most popular games on Valve’s handheld anyway.