Capcom seemingly removed Resident Evil 2’s ray tracing in new update

On the bright side, there’s no reason not to play the DX11 version now

Capcom published a new Resident Evil 2 update on Steam, and it appears to have removed ray tracing from the horror game. A few Reddit users posted about it on the PC gaming and Resident Evil subreddits, where they said it’s gone from Resident Evil 3 remake as well. Capcom hasn’t acknowledged the feature’s absence, so fans are speculating about what the cause might be.

The option still remains on Resident Evil 4 remake and Resident Evil 7 on PC. Dolby Atmos audio settings are also gone in Resident Evil 3 remake.

Some think it might have just been an accident, that Capcom somehow broke the feature without realizing when it pushed the update. One user suggested that it might relate to corporate partnerships and used Boundary as an – unverified – example. Developer Skystone partnered with AMD in late 2022 and removed ray tracing and DLSS support in Boundary a few months later. Whether the two events are connected is pure speculation from Redditers, though.

A possible contender for the reason is that the feature is busted. Some users reported ray tracing on the PC version of Resident Evil 4 remake caused the game to crash and displayed a D3D error message, even though their setups were more than capable of running the specified settings. No such problems seemed to have manifested in connection with Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3, though.

For now, we’ll just have to wait and see if Capcom publishes a statement about the removal.

While some were concerned they somehow caused the issue themselves, others were just glad they could download the DirectX 11 version again without missing out on any features. They said they always had trouble with the DirectX 12 version and disliked its performance and audio compared to the DX11 version.