Project Cars 2 PC Performance Review

1080p Performance

In our general benchmark tests, we will be testing the game at Ultra Settings with SMAA set to High, which is the game maxed out in all performance/visual settings except for AA (the highest AA setting is MSAA).

Again our benchmarks will be taken in the Nürburgring in a 30 car race under the Thunderstorm weather condition, presenting a good worst-case scenario for Project Cars 2. 

In this test the only GPU to achieve constant 60+ FPS framerates is out GTX 1080 Founders Edition, only barely achieving this goal. Please note that this is in one of the game’s most demanding areas using the highest game settings. In other weather conditions out average framerate performance would act as a decent approximation for minumum framerate. 

At this resolution, all of these GPUs are able to achieve framerates of over 60FPS with the correct graphical settings, though PC gamers will need to invest in a beefy hardware configuration to fully max this game out.  

One thing to note is the terrible performance that if offered up by AMD’s R9 Fury X GPU, which up until the release of AMD’s RX Vega 64 was the company’s flagship GPU in terms of single-GPU compute performance. The much slower RX 480 manages to achieve almost exactly the same performance as the R9 Fury X, which is surprising given the Fury X’s higher levels of compute performance. It seems AMD has made some meaningful changes to their GPU architecture in recent years, removing whatever is limiting the R9 Fury X’s performance.