Resident Evil Village got a double punch today with two major updates to Capcom's tale of macabre mishaps and hand amputations: first, as promised last week, AMD's FidelityFX super-resolution feature is now available in game settings; second, anti-piracy-related related stuttering is now a thing of the past.

Both are very positive steps for the latest Resi, as FSR uses spatial upscaling and sharpening to increase in-game frame rates, making low-resolution input look nearly equivalent to native and significantly increasing frame rates. We have tested FSR on several launch titles and it worked beautifully.

While not as good as AMD's DLSS, it is a small hit in terms of overall fidelity and can improve performance for free.

While FSR does make a difference in general game frame rates, it is Resi's update to their implementation of the Denuvo anti-piracy plugin that could make a bigger difference in the actual play experience. And strangely enough, it may be the Pirates of the Resident Evil Village that made this patch available.

When tested on the cracked DRM-free and release versions, the official game showed regular stuttering in the frame rate. However, the cracked Resi was as smooth as a pool of blood under Ethan's regularly chopped hands.

The stuttering was widely believed to be caused by Denuvo itself, but the company said it had nothing to do with Resi's performance issues and "Capcom's implementation is unrelated to Denuvo's solution, so we cannot comment specifically."

Capcom is currently making adjustments to optimize its anti-piracy technology, which should have fixed the stuttering issue. The report also suggests that the problem was largely on Capcom's part.

For better or worse, this patch will provide a higher quality "Resident Evil 7: Resident Evil Village" experience, regardless of whether or not AMD decides to go with FSR.

As all good patches do.