Resident Evil 2 and 3 Ray Tracing Removed From PC Versions on Steam

A recent update to the PC versions of the Resident Evil 2 and 3 remakes removed ray tracing. Last week Capcom announced it would be ending technical support on the DirectX 11 branch of the game but didn’t make any comment that it would be changing the DirectX 12 version. This stealth update has left fans confused and wondering if the removal of RTX was intentional or an accident.

How to get ray tracing back in Resident Evil 2 and 3 on Steam

While the current DX12 builds of RE2 and 3 remake are missing ray tracing on Steam, you can revert to the previous version. Reddit user UnawareChalk posted these instructions for Resident Evil 2:

1. Open Steam console (Win+R: steam://open/console)
2. Enter “download_depot 883710 883715 4596656973454619188“
3. Open the preferences for RE2 in Steam and set updates to “Update this game when I launch it.”
4. Find your RE2 folder.
5. Back up the contents to somewhere on your PC.
6. Copy the content from “C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\content\app_883710\depot_883715\” into your RE2 folder.

From these instructions, we can extrapolate that you can get the previous version of Resident Evil 3 remake with these steps:

1. Open Steam console (Win+R: steam://open/console)
2. Enter “download_depot 952060 952062 7305189131432908184“
3. Open the preferences for RE3 in Steam and set updates to “Update this game when I launch it.”
4. Find your RE3 folder.
5. Back up the contents to somewhere on your PC.
6. Copy the content from “C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\content\app_952060\depot_952062\” into your RE3 folder.

While ray tracing is seen as a nice bonus in most games, with these titles, it solved a major graphical issue. Both RE2 and RE3 have terrible Screen Space Reflections, and RTX removed that weird wet look the game had before.

Fortunately, Resident Evil 7 still has ray tracing, and the console versions of RE2 and 3 are unaffected. Unfortunately, we still don’t know the reason why RTX was removed for RE2 and 3 on PC, but we’ll update our article with the answer if Capcom releases a statement.