Resident Evil Village: the Maiden demo examined on PlayStation 5 Eurogamer.net If you click on a link and make a purchase we may receive a small commission. Read our editorial policy. Resident Evil Village: the Maiden demo examined on PlayStation 5 4K, ray tracing, performance and more discussed by the team. Feature by Richard Leadbetter Technology Editor, Digital Foundry Updated on 23 Jan 2021 38 comments In the wake of the surprise 'drop' of the Resident Evil Village 'Maiden' demo for PlayStation 5 last night, the Digital Foundry team sat down to talk about their impressions of the new demo. John Linneman and Alex Battaglia are joined by series expert Alex Aniel, author of Itchy, Tasty: An Unofficial of Resident Evil. The result? The video embedded on this page! Image quality makes for a good portion of the discussion, where the PlayStation 5 delivers a full 3840x2160, with Capcom deploying RE Engine's excellent checkerboard-style image reconstruction technology to render up from a lower base resolution. It's one of the more impressive implementations, looking very, very close to actual native rendering. The handling of materials and rich geometry in evidence in the demo also impressive, as does the HDR solution. In fact, the game doesn't quite have the same punch viewed in standard SDR - blacks are quite as black as you feel they should be, while HDR mode makes a huge difference here. The only noticeable issue seems to be low resolution textures, when certain parts of the environment are viewed up close. The Digital Foundry team present their first thoughts on the RE Village 'Maiden' demo. Also interesting is that similar to Devil May Cry 5 Special Edition, Capcom also seems to be using the console's ray tracing hardware for RT reflections. The actual effect is very subtle and the reflections themselves are of a low resolution, but it's definitely a step above the RE Engine's more typical screen-space reflections which historically haven't look too good on prior RE Engine titles. The impact of ray tracing on performance is not clear, but while targeting 60 frames per second, the game can't quite sustain it: big open areas can cause small issues while frame-rate drops significantly in attack sequences. It'll be interesting to see how performance holds up in the expansive outdoor areas - parts of the game we've only glimpsed so far in promotional material. Of course, this is an early demo and not necessarily representative of final performance, but we're certainly going to be interested to see how Resident Evil Village plays out - particularly as it's another cross-generation console game, with PS4 and Xbox One renditions of the title taking their place alongside their shiny next-gen counterparts. Regardless, first impressions are certainly favourable and if you have the means, we highly recommend checking out this demo. We'll be sure to follow the progress of Resident Evil Village right up to launch and beyond. Will you support the Digital Foundry team? Digital Foundry specialises in technical analysis of gaming hardware and software, using state-of-the-art capture systems and bespoke software to show you how well games and hardware run, visualising precisely what they're capable of. In order to show you what 4K gaming actually looks like we needed to build our own platform to supply high quality 4K video for offline viewing. So we did. Our videos are multi-gigabyte files and we've chosen a high quality provider to ensure fast downloads. However, that bandwidth isn't free and so we charge a small monthly subscription fee of £4.50. We think it's a small price to pay for unlimited access to top-tier quality encodes of our content. Thank you. 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