Project Cars 2 PC Performance Review

Weather Effects – Huge levels of performance variance!

In Project Cars 2, the weather has a huge impact on the game’s performance. Effects like rain, snow and fox will all cause additional particles to be drawn in, effect visibility and add additional elements into the scene that will affect both the game’s visuals and how vehicles traverse each track.   

With Project Cars 2 featuring such a large number of in-game weather types, we decided early on that testing all of them was simply not possible due to time constraints, so we decided to test the five most extreme weather conditions in the game which range from rain and thunder to blizzard levels of snow and fog.  

In this test, we played the game at maximum settings on the Nürburgring with a total of 30 vehicles on the track, playing the opening section of the race where the maximum number of vehicles are present within the scene at once. 

Here we can see that Clear weather offers the highest levels of in-game performance, with Thunderstorm offering the lowest levels of in-game performance. Note how large the performance gap is here, with minimum framerates being almost 45% lower because of the change in weather conditions. 

For Project Cars 2 we decided to make a Thunderstorm weather condition as part of our benchmarking run, giving a worst-case scenario for game performance. This means that the game will perform much better than this in standard gameplay, provided the users are playing/driving in less stressful weather conditions.