Resident Evil Requiem is supposed to showcase a cutting-edge graphics technique: GPU-accelerated data decompression. GDeflate is a data compression algorithm developed by Nvidia that can use the power of a GPU to decompress stuff very quickly. Instead, it has become a puzzle worthy of the survival horror game itself.
Resident Evil Requiem is proving to be one of the standout releases of 2026 so far but there's one aspect of the game that puts it into a very exclusive club: the use of DirectStorage and GPU data decompression. However, what's going on behind the scenes is a bit of a mystery because it appears to be a bit random as to which GPUs use it, even ones that are theoretically fully capable.
Testing using the SpecialK analysis tool revealed wild inconsistency. With an RTX 5090, RTX 5070, and RTX 5060, Resident Evil Requiem uses the GPU to decompress data. However, with an RTX 4060 laptop, the CPU fallback was used, despite the graphics chip fully supporting GPU decompression. More bizarrely, a quick driver reinstall with the RTX 5090 resulted in the fallback being used.
Independent testing by PC Gamer revealed further anomalies. Testing on an RTX 5070 rig, an RTX 4080 Super PC, and one with a Radeon RX 7900 XT showed that in all three cases, the CPU fallback option is being used, even though every single one of those GPUs is capable of handling the decompression.
The root cause remains unclear. Driver version doesn't seem to affect it, nor whether the graphics card has resizable BAR enabled or not, so there's either some bugs going on in the game's code, or the detection mechanism for the GPU decompression just isn't robust enough. Parallels can be drawn to other titles; some games only ever use CPU decompression, such as Ghost of Tsushima, because the developers deem that it's better to leave the GPU to do nothing but rendering, and the fact that modern CPUs are actually more than up to the task anyway.
The practical impact, however, is negligible. It doesn't matter if your CPU is handling GDeflate, or even if the GPU is, because the performance difference between the two is too small to be really noticeable. Capcom's implementation of the proprietary engine RE Engine (Reach for the Moon Engine) has been significantly modernised to integrate advanced rendering techniques based on DirectX 12 Ultimate API, with the engine's core designed for high scalability and deterministic distribution of the computational load between CPU and GPU resource pools.
Very few games have actively used GPU decompression; Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is one, Spider-Man 2 being another. Requiem's attempted use of the technology represents an ambitious step forward, even if the implementation has stumbled. For most players, the distinction between what happens under the bonnet is academic; the game performs well regardless.