Q&A: How Capcom Brought Path Tracing to RE ENGINE Across PRAGMATA and Resident Evil Requiem

Capcom’s RE ENGINE team set out to bring path tracing into two shipping titles at once, Resident Evil Requiem and PRAGMATA, each with a different visual identity. 

Over two years, the RE ENGINE team built a reference path tracer, validated its lighting against common DCC path tracers, then scaled it into a game-oriented version optimized for DLSS and built on the NVIDIA RTX Kit. 

The payoff: direct lighting now runs through the path tracer instead of shadow maps, the visual gap between gameplay and cutscenes is greatly reduced, and strand hair picks up real-time light transmission in both titles. 

The NVIDIA gaming team spoke with RE ENGINE about the transition from ray tracing to path tracing, what it changed in the content pipeline, and where the renderer goes next.

Why was now the time for Capcom to introduce path tracing into RE ENGINE in PRAGMATA and Resident Evil Requiem?

RE ENGINE has long invested in rendering technologies, including ray tracing, to create more immersive experiences. Titles such as Resident Evil Requiem and PRAGMATA increasingly rely on lighting to define the player experience through dark atmospheres, complex materials, and natural reflections.

Our game teams wanted indirect lighting and reflections to be integrated naturally across environments rather than adjusted individually. Advances in NVIDIA path tracing and frame generation technologies also made it realistic to bring rendering quality once limited to offline production into real-time games.

We also wanted to provide high-end PC users with experiences that can only be achieved on powerful hardware.

The introduction of path tracing is therefore the result of years of R&D, creative demands from game teams, the maturation of external technologies, and changing market conditions all aligning at the same time.

How did you evolve from a ray tracing pipeline to a path tracing pipeline across multiple titles?

The game version was then scaled down to operate efficiently in real-time environments.