Capcom’s Reach for the Moon (RE) Engine has become the new standard for the overwhelming majority of its titles since it was first used for 2017’s Resident Evil 7, and Street Fighter fans were more than pleased with the transition away from Unreal Engine 4 with Street Fighter 5 and to the RE Engine for Street Fighter 6.
That said, Capcom has announced their looking to update the now five year old tech and evolve it into the RE neXt ENGINE (REX).
The original RE Engine boasts the capabilities and flexibility to upgrade titles that were created within earlier versions. For instance, the aforementioned Resident Evil 7 was initially released on the PlayStation 4, but has been upgraded in its PlayStation 5 port to take advantage of features like ray tracing.
Even in the case of Street Fighter 5 and Tekken 7, we saw Unreal Engine 4 updated to correct a handful of issues such as input delay. It would stand to reason that Street Fighter 6 could potentially also go through a similar evolution in order to take advantage of the new bells and whistles REX comes with.
The main upgrade highlighted by Capcom for REX is the use of Mesh Shaders and Visibility Buffers, which reduce memory usage and essentially translate to performance and visual improvements.
At this point we don’t know how far off REX is, what all it will offer, and whether or not it will actually impact Street Fighter 6, but with the success and impact of the original RE Engine, we more than welcome whatever Capcom is bringing to the table next.
You can see more details on the coming impacts of Visibility Buffers and Mesh Shaders around the 21 minute mark in Capcom’s presentation video below: