Rage 2 PC analysis: what does it take to run at 1080p60 and beyond

Rage 2’s console release revealed a big divide in performance between the standard and enhanced machines. PS4 Pro and Xbox One X delivered beautifully smooth 60 frames per second gameplay, with a drop to 30fps on vanilla hardware. The big surprise? Even Microsoft’s six teraflop monster ‘only’ ran at 1080p resolution, leaving it down to the PC game to scale up to higher resolution displays. But what does it take to hit 1440p or even 4K at 60fps? And in what other ways does PC scale beyond the console experience?

First impressions are certainly promising. In common with Wolfenstein: The New Colossus, Bethesda has taken the brave move of shipping Rage 2 just with Vulkan API support, with no DirectX fallback. Settings-wise, the game is fairly comprehensive with plenty of tweakables to adjust, including toggles for contentious post-processing effects like chromatic aberation and motion blur. The game can run fully unlocked with frame-rates beyond 60fps (unlike the original Rage) and 21:9 ultrawide support is also baked in.

There’s even support for dynamic resolution scaling, which potentially could be very useful… if it were working. From what I’ve witnessed, internal resolution increases based on screen movement (?) with the end result being that jumping on the spot can deliver a higher quality image. It doesn’t seem to scale according to GPU load as you would expect, suggesting that the feature is very broken right now. Regardless, I’d suggest turning this feature off, with the hope being that its functionality will be addressed in a forthcoming patch.

Beyond that, while Rage 2’s settings selection is impressive, actual scalability is somewhat limited. The biggest single performance win beyond adjusting resolution and without compromising visual quality noticeably is to drop ambient occlusion from ultra to high, delivering a nine per cent boost in my testing. Turning it down to medium increases that to 13 per cent but the quality starts to look a little off. Perhaps not surprisingly, the high quality preset is equivalent to Xbox One X’s turn-out. Beyond that, shadow quality tweaks can increase performance by a couple of points, but again, aggressively pulling down settings in this area delivers lower than console fidelity.

The most important setting that sets PC apart from its console siblings is geometric detail: this controls the range at which LODs pop in, and Xbox One X is equivalent to the medium setting. High and ultra settings push the LODs out, making for a consistently more pleasing traversal experience. CPU may be your primary bottleneck here by running at ultra, as there’s only a small dip to performance on the GPU side by opting for the top-end setting – that’s why we’ve opted to leave this at max in our optimised settings above.