There’s no ray tracing whatsoever, so you can’t blame the middling performance on that.
It’s been 13 years since Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine was released but at long last, the third-person shooter-slasher game has a sequel in the form of Space Marine 2. Graphics and engine technology have moved on a lot since the era of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, and we now live in a world of ray tracing, upscaling, and frame generation. Bucking modern sensibilities somewhat, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 only follows one of those trends.
Developer Sabre Interactive has 23 years of experience but its most recent game that’s very similar to Space Marine 2 is World War Z—both involve massive hordes of enemies to wade through and destroy, and both involve cooperative squad-based gameplay. In terms of rendering technology, Space Marine 2 is very traditional, with no use of ray tracing for lighting, shadows, or reflections. To which your Radeon GPU might well be heaving a sigh of relief.
But that doesn’t mean the game is guaranteed to run at high frame rates on older or lower-tier hardware. The recommended hardware requirements for 60 fps at 1080p ultra settings include a Ryzen 7 5800X and a GeForce RTX 3070. While these aren’t the latest generation of chips, they’re not exactly slow either.
As you’ll soon see, it’s clear that the developers targeted 60 fps for most PC gamers playing Space Marine 2.
To examine the game’s performance, I selected a region in the single-player campaign that involves two bouts of intense combat. Space Marine 2 does frequent checkpoint saves and in the review code, there is no way to load an earlier save. That meant having to stop a benchmark run mid-battle before a checkpoint was reached, and I found that the recorded frame rate varied a lot from run to run.
To get the figures below, I performed six runs, selecting the three lowest sets and averaging those. In some cases, the frame rates were around 15% higher than those shown but on occasion, they were 5 to 10% lower.
There are four quality presets for the graphics options, which we’ll look at in more detail shortly, and as you can see, at 1080p low, all of the test systems coped with Space Marine 2 just fine. Well, apart from the handheld gaming PC, which is a bit of a shame as the game would be fun to play in short bursts on a pocket PC.
However, the moment you switch to 1080p medium, the lower-end systems struggle to reach 60 fps. Performance on the Arc A770 is especially choppy and there are numerous rendering glitches, such as missing textures and misplaced effects, so Intel has some work to do with its drivers.
The higher-tier hardware runs at over 60 fps all the way up to the ultra preset but if you want really high frame rates (e.g. 120 fps or higher), then you’re not going to get that without the use of upscaling and/or a system with the best gaming CPU and GPU in it.
