Project CARS 2 Performance Review

By Yannick Guerrini
published

Conclusion

With Project CARS 2, Slightly Mad Studios offers a very attractive racing game that sports amazing realism and advanced graphics rendering.

Naturally, you'll need a beefy graphics card to fully take advantage of what it has to offer. Forget about mid-range cards like the Radeon RX 460/560 and GeForce GTX 1050. They hit their limits before you're able to dial this game's detail settings up to where they should be. At the same time, you want a CPU with at least four physical cores.

Room for Additional Optimizations

As usual, when it comes to game benchmarking, high clock rates are better. And that's one of the issues we have with Project CARS 2: it doesn't seem like much was done to take advantage of CPUs with higher core counts. Where other games more uniformly utilize our six-core Ryzen-based test platform, Project CARS 2 leans heavily on a single core.

Thus, the improved weather modeling proves to be both an advantage and an inconvenience: extremely realistic, this technology is also hungry for hardware resources. It can bring even mainstream hardware to its knees.

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Project CARS 2
Project CARS 2
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Yannick Guerrini
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7 Comments Comment from the forums
  • spdragoo
    Question on the Minimum/Recommended specs:

    Configuration
    Recommended
    <snip>
    Graphics
    GeForce GTX 1080 or Radeon RX 480

    I'm assuming the "GTX 1080" is a misprint. While I'm an AMD fan, I know the RX 580 isn't anywhere near as good as the GTX 1080. Also, I didn't see any testing done with the GTX 1080, but the GTX 1060 did show up.

    Also...any plans to do some more testing with other older/lower GPUs? I'm only asking because a) although the listed minimum (GTX 680) isn't too far off the RX 580/GTX 1060 in performance, it is 3 generations behind (& you did testing with GPUs that are technically lower on the hierarchy than a GTX 680); & b) my own GPU (R9 380) is roughly comparable to the 680 (& superior to the GTX 1050/1050TI & RX 460/560 that were used in testing).
    Reply
  • anbello262
    I would actually like to ask the exact opposite. Any chance of testing 1080 or 1080ti and 4k? This game has ultra realistic graphics that are really affected by resolution/alias.
    Reply
  • Th_Redman
    I want to try to understand why my old i-7 950(overclocked to 4GHz from 3.06 stock)with a great aftermarket air cooler supposedly couldn't run this game(says minimum i5 3470). I have it paired with a Zotac GTX 970 and 12 GB's of DDR3 1600Mhz RAM so shouldn't that be enough to run the game with good FPS at 1920x1080P resolution?
    Reply
  • kerberosa20
    try it and u will see if it will be enough
    but stock i7 950 has around half single core performance of i7 3450...
    so dont expect miracles
    Reply
  • nmezib
    Any hope of doing VR performance? Like with using Nvidias FCAT tool, or by measuring reprojection times, etc.?

    VR sim racing is a real big deal, and PCars 2 is one of the best looking but most demanding of them. It would be nice to have a list of the most important graphics settings with respect to performance impact.
    Reply
  • cooldex
    yea woulda like to see 4k tested with gtx 1070 but i actually have the first one which ran pretty well on my laptop at 40fps at 4k (1070)
    Reply
  • gadgety
    Shortly after the release of Project CARS (Community Assisted Racing Simulator), Slightly Mad Studios and World of Mass Development started fundraising for its sequel.

    They didn't make enough profit on the first?
    Reply