F1 22 in technical MOT with CPU and GPU benchmarks: Evolution with more ray tracing for everyone

With F1 22, the annual Formula 1 game was just launched, as usual under the leadership of the racing specialists from Codemasters, who now belong to EA. only in last year a story mode called “Braking Point” premiered in the series. The story about youngster Aiden Jackson and old master Casper Akkerman revolutionized the genre it didn’t, had some logical errors and sometimes embarrassing dialogue, but overall it was an innovation that was fun. Codemasters announced back in March that the story would be on hiatus this year. But there is now with F1 Life a kind of player hub where we are allowed to display our trophies, clothes and furniture. We unlock them either in the game through certain achievements or in the Podium Pass, including microtransactions, of course. In addition, there are supercars on top. At the time of the announcement, there was a lot of confusion among fans of the series as to whether it was the Australian touring car series of the same name or just chic speedsters. It’s now clear that we’ll have the posh streetcars of some Formula 1 teams in our booth and that we’ll be allowed to drive these super sports cars ourselves in some challenges. If you want to know more about the game itself, read the Test to F1 22 with the colleagues from PC Games. Everything revolves around the technical side here, especially the new ray tracing options.

F1 22 in the technology test: under the hood

Like its predecessors, F1 22 relies on Codemasters’ in-house ego engine, which has again received improvements. The game engine has been made DirectX 12 compatible in recent years and always offered a fallback to DirectX 11 for older computers in Grid (2019), F1 2019 and F1 2020. This has been the end of F1 2021, the series now runs exclusively with DirectX 12 in order to present the additional technical achievements nicely and smoothly. What has remained is the physics-based shader model introduced with F1 2019, which, together with the again improved lighting, achieves a lifelike quality. Apart from the Windows 10 requirement, the system requirements remain moderate, as the table reveals. Only if you want to see all the effects in maximum quality, you need a modern PC and, above all, a graphics card that is capable of ray tracing. It is striking that the CPU requirements have not changed compared to the predecessor. You can read later in the benchmarks why this is interesting.

The options menu is extensive as usual and offers a variety of graphics options, customization options for game displays and HUD, an adjustable frame rate limit, multi-monitor support as well as gamma adjustment and HDR support. Of course, F1 supports 22 (buy now ) also all common image formats. Various methods are available for covering/shading the surroundings: In addition to HBAO+ from Nvidia’s Gameworks program, ASSAO is waiting for the from Intel adopted Adaptive Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion on their deployment. Both approaches offer an appropriate quality, HBAO+ looks a bit finer, while ASSAO applies a bit more extensively and darkens the shadows a little more, but also captures some elements that are not or only very subtly shadowed by HBAO+.

F1 22: The extensive graphics options

Alternatively, use Combined Adaptive Compute Ambient Occlusion (CACAO), an ambient occlusion optimized by AMD for RDNA graphics cards. This means that F1 22 is technically very similar to its predecessor, the biggest changes actually “only” concern ray tracing, which we took a close look at.

F1 22 with advanced ray tracing

Last year’s F1 2021 was the first serial spin-off to implement modern beam tracking, with the tech backbone borrowing parts from Dirt 5. In F1 22 you can now activate not only raytracing shadows and reflections, but also RT ambient occlusion if you wish. Optionally, transparent reflections can also be displayed using ray tracing. The quality can be configured in three steps. Of course, this costs performance and puts a lot of strain on both the graphics card and the processor, more on that later in the benchmarks.

Praiseworthy: The ray tracing effects can not only be switched on and off individually, their quality can also be set to three levels: normal, high and ultra high. “Normal” corresponds to the minimum quality and is particularly noticeable in quiet scenes with a crumbly, low resolution. High and Ultra High offer more or less significant improvements. We assume that “Normal” works with 1/4 of the set resolution and “High” with half. According to our judgement, “Ultra High” does not work with full resolution, but with the same as “High”, but seems to include more objects. The differences between high and ultra are marginal for both reflections and shadows, as is the cost of performance. Now let’s take a look at some comparison images. It’s best not to watch them on your cell phone, but on a large screen where you also play.

As in F1 2021, the ray-traced shadows also help F1 22 to be more realistic. In the many years with raster graphics, we have gotten used to the fact that shadows are drawn sharply using shadow maps and associate high resolution with it – but this is not realistic since the light is scattered by trees, signs and other distant objects in nature and the shadows therefore become softer. F1 22 realistically reproduces this phenomenon with active ray tracing.

The lowest quality level “Normal” causes the RT shadows to pixel up more or less visibly depending on the scene, distance and speed and waft like black clouds. If the quality is set to “High”, the precision and stability of the shadows increase visibly. “Ultra high” brings only minor improvements, but is still noticeable at least in the still image – but not with typical racing speeds. The same applies to the reflections, which are rarely used over a large area, but benefit significantly when switching from “Normal” to “High”. We take these observations as an opportunity to create the graphics card benchmarks on the following page with the ray tracing quality level “High” (in addition to rasterizing, of course).

Anti-aliasing: TAA, FSR and DLSS are available

Upscaling methods such as DLSS or FSR are becoming more and more popular and F1 22 also offers you the choice of both technologies. DLSS is available in version 2.4.0.0, AMD’s upscaling FSR is currently only in version 1.0. However, entries in the game’s own configuration file and the naming of the FSR modes in the menu suggest that FSR 2.0 will soon be available via an update. The upscaling process can optionally be adapted to your own wishes with a sharpness control. If you don’t like upscaling, use classic TAA, optionally sharpened using AMD’s algorithm FidelityFX CAS (Contrast Adaptive Sharpening). A comparison of all available modes without the switchable sharpening in WQHD/1440p:

TAA is likely to appeal to most viewers as it achieves the best blend of smoothing and detail preservation. If CAS is added, a “crisp” impression is created, but some details appear over-sharpened. Due to the reduced resolution, FSR 1.0 swallows most of the details and clearly interpolates. DLSS achieves clearly more detailed results with the same internal resolution, but shows pixelation with high upscaling factors such as (ultra) performance. It is positive that in F1 22 everything runs according to the textbook or guideline. In F1 2021, DLSS was initially applied without the Nvidia-recommended MIP bias adjustment, resulting in blurry and oversampled textures. In F1 22 the texture LOD is correctly the Output-Resolution set accordingly so that the surfaces look their best.

Unnecessary savings

You’ve looked at the comparison images and wondered why the texture quality decreases after only a few meters? You are not alone in this. F1 22 offers a lot of graphics options, but it doesn’t necessarily do what you expect. A circumstance that has been running through the series for years concerns texture filtering. This is explicitly set to the maximum value of 16x in the menu. This means that textures that can take it – should be anisotropically filtered up to 16:1. Because even if the game’s own configuration file does not specify a minimum and maximum AF level, but only 16x, there is no doubt that 16x anisotropic filtering is not used. Unfortunately, there are no in-game tools to get rid of the incomprehensible texture mush. The only possibility consists of the highest possible resolution, in which the texture LOD is automatically adjusted. Geforce users can also benefit from the function that the driver can override the settings desired by the game even under DirectX 12. In other words: If you force 16:1 AF via the driver, the textures shine with real 16x AF (a game restart is required for this, hence the slightly different scenes):

On top of that. Have you seen the abrupt quality differences in asphalt? We have marked these manually in the following pictures. Up until the 1.05 patch, F1 22 showed this phenomenon, which we believe to be the DirectX 12 Variable Rate Shading feature. VRS reduces the quality (resolution) of similarly colored areas to improve performance. We can’t answer why this is done so conspicuously, why the graphics menu doesn’t say a word about it and whether it’s even necessary in view of the high frame rates. As of now, we can’t even tell if it’s actually an unfinished implementation of VRS, because since version 1.05 the asphalt looks clean. We’ll continue to keep an eye on the road for upcoming patches and will update the article as soon as anything moves.

F1 22 with VR support for the first time

Completely new in F1 22 is support for virtual reality headsets. You can start VR mode by selecting it while launching the game on Steam. Valve Index, Oculus Rift and HTC Vive are officially supported. The mode offers a special feature: no ray tracing is supported – apparently the performance costs are simply too high. It’s a pity that the developers don’t leave this choice to the player. Due to the time involved, we have so far refrained from benchmarking in VR mode. On the next page, however, we will deal with the regular CPU and graphics card benchmarks.