A Plague Tale: Requiem Patch Adds RT Shadows: Raytracing Makes Shadows Crisp At Minimal Performance Impact
Having ended A Plague Tale: Requiem twice now, I must say that the game doesn’t only tell a great story but it does so with some of the most impressive environments and visuals, in general, that I have seen in recent years. The game got an almost perfect 9/10 score in our own review & today, it looks like the developers have released a new patch that enables raytracing, delivering even more visual fidelity. I tried out the new patch which specifically enables Raytraced Shadows. The game is very heavy on the shadows in almost all sections that are brightly lit, especially the Island section in Part 7 of the game. I was running the game on the PC where the patch has landed and the system is spec’d with an Intel Core i9-13900K CPU, 32 GB of DDR5-7600 memory, and an RTX 4090 SUPRIM X from MSI, all of which is running on the latest Windows 11 22H2 build on a fast TeamGroup Cardea A440 PRO SSD. Just by looking at a few images that I took in-game, we can see that Raytracing really makes the shadows look much sharper and crisper. The borders look more defined and that goes for both characters and objects. You can see some comparison images of RT enabled and disabled below: A Plague Tale: Requiem RT Shadows Enabled: A Plague Tale: Requiem RT Shadows Disabled: But most of you might be wondering, just how much FPS loss is there for enabling raytracing in A Plague Tale: Requiem? Well, the good news is that the effect isn’t a whole lot taxing. You can see a frame rate deficit between 15-20% which is definitely some of the lowest RT drops I have noticed in a while. I was running the game at Ultra with DLSS disabled at 4K native and got anywhere from 60-70 FPS with RT enabled and 90-100 FPS with RT disabled. This shows decent performance on RTX 4090-class cards but I will be testing out AMD’s RDNA 3, RDNA 2, and NVIDIA’s older Ampere cards to see if they see a bigger performance loss with RT-enabled compared to the newer Ada cards.
You can also note the following performance and visual differences between Native, DLSS 2, and DLSS 3 in both RT-enabled/disabled settings: 4K Native (RT Enabled): 4K DLSS2 (RT Disabled): 4K DLSS2 (RT Enabled): 4K DLSS3 (RT Disabled): 4K DLSS3 (RT Enabled): The Raytracing shadows patch is now available for download and has a size of around 200 MB so you should already have it loaded up the next time you boot up Steam (the platform I used to test the game).
