Hair Strands is one of the settings in Resident Evil 4 Chainsaw to get better-looking hair. This is similar to Hairworks in previously released games. Turning on Hair Strands seems to destroy performance on Nvidia cards, which is the case even on top-tier cards such as the RTX 4090.
Resident Evil 4 Chainsaw Hair Strands Destroys Performance On Nvidia Cards
Update: Apparently, the performance degradation on the AMD Radeon 7900 XTX is not as high.
The Nvidia RTX 4090 was used for testing the game along with the latest hotfix driver. CapFrameX notes that the performance of the game significantly drops when the Hair Strands setting is turned on and set to high. The performance with Hair Strands on high is around 108 FPS, but when this setting is turned off entirely, the performance increases to 155 FPS.
It is possible that the setting is not working as intended since users have reported that the actual hair quality does not seem to improve when Hair Strand is set to high. Others reported that the performance with the setting on low was actually lower than when Hair Strand is set to high.
Since I do not have an AMD graphics card, I cannot test if the same performance degradation is true for AMD cards. Neither did CapFrameX mention the performance impact on AMD graphics cards. We recommend disabling this setting if you are interested in playing Resident Evil 4 Chainsaw.
While this is a demo, players should get an idea of what they can expect to see once the full game is available. I can only hope that issues such as these are resolved before the release of the full game. While Resident Evil 4 is a remake, it still goes for the price of a new AAA game, and the deluxe edition is priced even higher at $70 USD. The demo is available right now if you are on the fence about the game and want a taste of what it has to offer.
Let us know what you think about the Hair Strands setting heavily impacting the performance of Nvidia GPUs in Resident Evil 4 Chainsaw and what your experience has been like.
