Like everyone else, I downloaded the Resident Evil 2 demo, but my purposes for downloading the game wasn't to simply check out the gameplay. My main purpose was to see how robust the graphical options were, how well my computer would handle the game, as well as how pretty I could get the game while keeping it running at acceptable framerates.
The computer I was testing it on has a 6600k, overclocked to 4.2Ghz (yeah it's pretty old), an overlocked GTX 1080, and 16GB or 2400 mhz RAM.
For the settings, I ran everything about as high as they can go at 1440p resolution, even enabling FXAA + TAA. Surprisingly, at the very first part of the station, everything ran at a smooth 70-80 frames per second. When you're close to a wall or something, you get over 90 sometimes. Doing puzzles, you get about 80 frames per second, which is fine because that part really shouldn't be that graphically taxing. The marble on the walls reflect a blurry version of the light, which is how finely polished marble should reflect light, sort of like those old school bank walls. The floors have a much more detailed reflection of what's above them but they're still blurry versions of the main space counterparts. The demo didn't seem to have real time ray tracing capabilities yet, and even if it did, because I'm too poor to afford a 20 series GPU, I wouldn't have been able to test them. I do think that the final game will support RTX, though, just not the demo build we got.
One thing I do appreciate from their graphical options is that they show the amount of video memory your settings are going to be using up and comparing it to the total memory your graphics card has left over. If you get too close to your max, they give you an orange warning. Get even closer, and they give you a red warning, which means doing so may produce even more bugs in your experience.
So everything was running fine and dandy until I got into the second part of the demo - the corridor with the puddles. At this point, I was dipping below 60 even just by standing still. I know my rig is old but I thought it could at least handle a corridor with some puddles at 1440p. It's still very playable at 50+ frames per second, but it kinda triggers me when I see my framerate go below 60. To enhance my experience, I decided to bring down the resolutions to high, but at only at 1GB. At high resolutions, you can pick between 1GB or 2GB or even higher for higher texture resolutions that would work well with 4k resolutions. I appreciate this level of customizability from PC games, I really do. It gives you the option to have lower resolutions with high texture resolutions and vice versa. It might work well with Nvidia's DLSS, who knows. Maybe I should get a 20 series card just to check that out.
Anyway, when the action picked up in the puddle-y area, this is where it all turned to hell. My framerates dipped drastically. I was 40+ frames per second. I couldn't believe it. If anything, I started to really feel the age of my computer. So, to try and alleviate some of that graphical strain, I tried to go with only TAA versus FXAA + TAA. I didn't notice any graphical downgrade. At least, none that my untrained pleb eye could tell. This did increase my framerates a little but I didn't have the chance to test it out again in the same problem area. The demo was only 30 minutes long, unfortunately.
Maybe when I get a copy of the full game, I'll try to just go with FXAA because everyone knows performs better than TAA but TAA is usually better looking. So, we'll see.
This demo build is probably very close to the actual release build but I do hope that some of the graphical hiccups would get ironed out in the final release. Hopefully, we won't see 50% decrease in framerates when zombies show up near puddles.