Project CARS 2 Performance Review

By Yannick Guerrini
published

Performance According To Vehicle Count

Project CARS 2 provides the best means of customizing a course's parameters we've seen, including the number of competing drivers. So, we wanted to explore the impact other cars have on performance scaling. After all, vehicle count changes your CPU's physics, AI, and simulation workload.

FPS, Frame Time & Smoothness

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The frame rate hit corresponding to more vehicles on the track is small, but still quantifiable. Thankfully, this has no impact on the perceived smoothness of our Radeon RX 580.

CPU, RAM & VRAM Resources

Our CPU's workload seems identical, regardless of how many vehicles we compete against. Perhaps the difference is simply too small to illustrate with this type of chart. Let's take a more detailed look:

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Indeed, adding vehicles does weigh on the most heavily-utilized core in a measurable way. It also causes utilization spikes on some of the other cores. This shouldn't come as a surprise, since more cars impose a higher number of AI-related calculations.

It's also no surprise to see system RAM and GDDR5 utilization rise with vehicle count.

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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