Rage 2 System Requirements, Benchmarks and Performance Analysis
Rage 2 is out now, offering fast-paced run-and-gun action with vehicular combat – if you want to know more about the game, read our Rage 2 review. I’m talking about performance here, and there’s a lot to cover. I’ve tested the Rage 2 on my full set of graphics cards and CPUs (26 GPUs and 8 CPUs to be exact). I’ll also discuss system requirements, all settings, and other major features.
The Rage 2 will run fine on mid-range hardware, but budget GPUs in particular will struggle. Unless you have at least a GTX 1070 or better, I wouldn’t plan for a max image quality of 1080p. For budget cards like the GTX 1050 or RX 560 (or the older GTX 760 and R9 370), you may want to lower the resolution or use resolution scaling to keep closer to 60fps.
Speaking of framerates, you’ll definitely want to stay above 30fps in Rage 2, as the game engine seems to tie everything to framerates to some extent – high framerates aren’t a problem, but below 30fps And things start to slow down. You walk, run, drive, reload, etc. at a slower pace (although luckily it also affects enemies). 20-30fps feels sluggish, while 10-15fps is really crawling. Since this is a single player game, it’s not the end of the world, but I removed all GPUs from testing at higher settings as they dropped below 30 once.
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Rage 2 does tick most of the important features – the biggest omission is multiplayer of any kind. Well, I guess there is a “revenge my death” option, but no traditional co-op or other modes. There’s full support for all resolutions and aspect ratios, and unlike the original Rage, there’s no frame rate cap, vertical sync can be disabled, a very large FOV range, and controller and keymap support comes with Photo Mode.
Mods are still a question mark – there’s no support yet, but a few months ago there was a comment about how id Software recognized the importance of mods, so it might come in the future. But Rage doesn’t see mod support either, so don’t count on it.
“I think I see a problem with your computer hardware…”
Rage 2 system requirements
The official Rage 2 system requirements(opens in a new tab) are very reasonable, but make no mention of target performance. The following are the minimum and recommended hardware provided by Bethesda:
at the lowest limit
- operating system: Windows 7, 8.1 or 10 (64-bit version)
- processor: Intel Core i5-3570 or AMD Ryzen 3 1300X
- memory: 8GB RAM
- Graphics: Nvidia GTX 780 3GB or AMD R9 280 3GB
- Storage: 50 GB free space
recommended
- operating system: Windows 7, 8.1 or 10 (64-bit version)
- processor: Intel Core i7-4770 or AMD Ryzen 5 1600X
- memory: 8GB RAM
- Graphics: Nvidia GTX 1070 8GB or AMD Vega 56 8GB
- Storage: 50 GB free space
Given the importance of staying above 30fps, I have to assume that the “minimum” specs are as low as around 45fps at 1080p, or maybe 60fps at 720p or higher. Meanwhile, the recommended specs appear to be 1080p super-resolution at 60fps or higher, or 1440p super-resolution at 45-50fps. I no longer test 700-series or R9 200-series GPUs, but they should be roughly on par with the GTX 1050 and RX 560.
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Rage 2 settings overview
Rage 2 offers a decent selection of graphics settings, as well as four global presets. However, the high and ultra presets are pretty much the same – ultra just bumps the geometric detail (basically the level of detail) up a notch with a negligible 1-2% drop in performance. So I skipped the extra test at 1080p high.More notably, even in at the lowest limit Quality, performance is only about 50% better. Although there are 14 advanced settings to adjust, most have little impact on performance or image quality. Here is the full rundown.
Graphics Presets: You can adjust all other settings in one place and is a great place to start. Low-end hardware will need to stick to low settings and possibly reduce resolution and/or enable resolution scaling. Mid-range cards should handle medium presets well, while higher performance cards can use ultra presets. Low quality runs about 50% faster than ultra quality, medium quality runs about 20-25% faster, and high quality is almost the same as ultra quality (1-2% faster).
Resolution ratio: Rage 2 supports dynamic resolution scaling, you can set a minimum percentage (10-100%) and a target frame rate of 20-240fps. However, just because you set a goal doesn’t mean you’ll hit it – on the midrange RX 580, I set a goal of 240 fps and a minimum scale of 10. The result is 115 fps, which looks very blocky and ugly. I usually don’t think about resolution scaling and just use a fixed resolution, but feel free to use it if you want.
Motion Blur: Apply a blur effect to objects in motion, if you don’t like motion blur you can get About 2% better performance.
Color difference: Apply a post-processing ribbon effect near the edge of the screen, disabling this effect is negligible 1-2% performance improvement.
Anisotropic terrain filtering: Enable higher quality filter mode on terrain and turn it off improve About 1% performance.
Geometric details: Objects that control certain elements pop out and enable higher quality models.While LOD scaling usually has a bigger impact on performance and visuals in other games, in Rage 2 this is only set to low 2% performance increase.
Global Illumination: This should improve the overall lighting quality, which usually means indirect lighting, although it doesn’t seem to actually do much. It definitely doesn’t do anything like ray traced GI or even SSRTGI.just turn off this feature 1% performance increase.
Depth of Field: Apply a blur effect to distant objects, mostly in cutscenes or when aiming a gun.disable this feature 1% performance increase (although in the specific cases mentioned there could be a bigger difference).
SSAO: The biggest single item to improve performance, turning off SSAO (Screen Space Ambient Occlusion) also tends to cause a very noticeable drop in image quality. Completely disable SSAO 10-15% better performancebut you can Get 7-10% And still close to the same image quality at low SSAO settings.
Antialiasing: Smooth any jagged edges of polygons. Rage 2 offers FXAA (slight improvement with little performance impact), TAA (temporary AA), or FXAA+TAA for “best” overall quality. Disable AA completely 5% performance increasebut if you want to improve performance a little, I recommend FXAA (alone) as a better compromise, otherwise the aliasing is very noticeable.
Player selfie: Players’ weapons and weapons cast shadows on themselves.Actually, I didn’t notice this at all, so you can disable it and 2-3% better performance if you want.
Dynamic reflection: Enable screen space reflections for things like puddles.Since there aren’t many puddles in the wasteland, it’s okay – disabled Improve performance by 2-5% (depending on your GPU).
Shadow Resolution: Strangely, higher settings give sharper Shadows, in some ways soft shadows look better at low/medium settings.i measured a 5% improvement over Nvidia GPU, but a lot AMD improved by 11%. Consider turning it off.
Shadow Lights: Controls the number of lights that can cast shadows at the same time. performance improvement 4 AMD percentagebut only Nvidia 2%.
Shading Quality: Choose between low or high Lighting and Shadows Quality and Complexity.low 1% performance increase It looks almost the same to me.
Soft particles: To smooth particle edges for certain effects (smoke, fire/explosion, etc.), use 0-1% improvement performance.
There are 14 possible settings in total, but only a few result in small changes in performance. I should note that the AMD GPUs I examined seem to show more potential for improvement than the Nvidia GPUs in various settings, at least in some respects. It’s a little weird because it has more VRAM so things like shadow quality would theoretically suffer less. In any case, other graphics cards may differ more than I measure, but as the two most popular AMD and Nvidia GPUs out there, it’s a good place to start.
That’s only about half the size of the graphics card I tested.
MSI provided all of the graphics hardware used to test the Rage 2, including the latest GeForce GTX and RTX cards. All GPUs come with a modest factory overclock, which in most cases provides about a 5% performance boost over the reference model.
My primary testbed uses an MSI Z390 MEG Godlike(opens in a new tab) motherboard with an overclocked Core i7-8700K(opens in a new tab) processor and G.Skill’s 16GB DDR4-3200 CL14 RAM(opens in a new tab) Open). I also ran additional tests on other Intel CPUs, including the stock Core i9-9900K (opens in new tab), Core i5-8400 (opens in new tab), and Core i3-8100 (opens in new tab) card open). AMD’s Ryzen 7 2700X(opens in a new tab) and Ryzen 5 2600X(opens in a new tab) processor (also in stock) uses the MSI X470 Gaming M7 AC(opens in a new tab) while the Ryzen 5 2400G (opens in a new tab) tab) ) tested in MSI B350I Pro AC (because M7 lacks video output). All AMD CPUs also use DDR4-3200 CL14 RAM. The game runs from a Samsung 860 Evo 4TB SATA SSD(Opens in a new tab) on a desktop and an NVMe OS drive on a laptop.
Tested Nvidia graphics cards
Tested AMD graphics cards
Tested laptops and motherboards
No buffaloes were harmed while running these benchmarks.
Rage 2 graphics card benchmark
Since the Rage 2 doesn’t have its own benchmarking tool, all benchmark data was recorded while playing the game — specifically running around the town of Gunbarrel. That’s a non-combat area, but I also did limited testing in several other areas, including driving in the wasteland and through a larger Goon Squad settlement (Doomsayer Peak). The problem is that the driving is relatively tedious (IMO), and while the combat is good, it’s also more varied. In my Goon Squad test, the minimum fps was slightly lower, but the average fps was about the same. For ease of testing, I’m sticking with Gunbarrel.
The Rage 2 doesn’t have the dynamic time or weather that I’ve noticed, which is a nice change for benchmarks…but also feels a little tedious. It’s always during the day, but for some reason the stars are also visible.
I used the latest Nvidia 430.64 and AMD 19.5.1 drivers to test these results. Both are ready for Rage 2, though future driver updates and patches may change things. For example, AMD’s 19.5.1 driver is 10-15% faster than 19.4.3 on many Radeon GPUs. For the GPU tests, I’m running an overclocked 5.0GHz i7-8700K to remove any potential CPU bottlenecks.
One more thing to mention is that Rage 2 uses the Vulkan API for rendering. It’s basically the OpenGL equivalent of DirectX 12, which means it’s a low-level API that usually helps AMD GPUs do better than DirectX 11/OpenGL games. That seems to be the case with the Rage 2, at least for relatively equivalent hardware.
Rage 2 looks pretty good, even at the lowest quality – probably because there’s still quite a bit of shadows, specular highlights, and other details. So budget hardware can’t hit a steady 60fps, so GTX 1050 Ti and below may need some help with resolution scaling (or just run on…
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