Project Cars 2 PC Performance Review

CPU Performance – Ryzen & Intel – Does Project Cars 2 benefit from high core counts?  

Methodology

Full on CPU performance testing is something that is relatively new in our PC game performance analysis pieces, with Ryzen performance being a new addition to our hardware test suite.  

Here we have tested the game using an Intel i7 6850K Broadwell-E Hex-core and an AMD Ryzen 7 1700X over a variety of core configurations when playing the game at 1080p max settings on a GTX 1080. Both CPUs are run at similar clock speeds. 

We ran our Ryzen 7 1700X with 8/16, 6/12, 4/8 and 4/4 core/thread configurations to closely match results from Ryzen 7, 5 and 3 processors. Note that in all of these tests that 16MB of L3 cache was active and that these are not exact emulations of each Ryzen series CPU at the same clock speeds. Even so, these results represent a reasonable ballpark figure.  

On the Intel side, we tested 6/12, 4/8, 4/4 and 2/4 core configurations to represent Intel’s current generation i3, i5 and i7 CPU core configurations.  

 

Project Cars 2

In our Project Cars 2 CPU tests, we decided to separate our testing into two halves, testing the game under both the game’s extremely stressful Thunderstorm weather option as well as the game’s clear weather condition. This will allow us to judge CPU performance in both demanding and easy weather conditions, though both of our tests are conducted on the Nürburgring in a 30 car race. 

Please note that CPU usage does drop when fewer racers are present in the game, making this 30 racer test case fairly demanding for this CPU test case.  

When looking at both graphs below we can see that Project Cars 2 really needs 4 strong CPU threads to run well, with our 2 core, 4 thread (Intel i3 simulation) test suffering from a huge performance drop in both Clear and Thunderstorm weather conditions. This drop is enough to drop the framerate as low as 39FPS in out Thunderstorm test case, which is well below all of our other results. This is why Slightly Mad Studios does not recommend that anyone plays this game without at least a quad-core CPU. 

It is also clear to see that Project Cars 2 does benefit from additional CPU cores, though the performance boost is far from linear. We can also see that the game prefers out Intel i7 6800K to our Ryzen 1700X, with a considerable performance delta when both CPUs are using four cores and four threads.   

One other thing to note here is regarding hyperthreading on our Ryzen CPU, with our Thunderstorm test preferring our 4 core, 8 thread config to our 4 core, 4 thread config. The opposite is true in clear weather conditions, showing that SMT can offer advantages or disadvantages with Ryzen depending on the exact in-game situation.