WRC 2010 PC Performance

It's been a while since we got a pure WRC game. Richard Burns Rally was the last great game in that category and since Codemasters literaly butchered the Colin McRae franchise, we were left with nothing. Untill now, as Black Bean is here to remind us why we all love rally games.

WRC 2010 will be released on October 8th and today we got our review code. So let's see how it performs. We'll use a Q6600 @ 3.6Ghz with 4GB DDR2 and an Nvida GTX295. The game utilizes all four cores of our quad-core, although as we can see it doesn't stress them. When using two cores, we saw better CPU utilization. Performance though was the same. So rest assured that WRC 2010 will run great if you have a dualcore.

Graphically, the game is average. Washed out textures with a lot of post processing effects and "empty" stages. It's pretty clear that WRC2010 looks dated and can't compete with other racing games, like Dirt2. Interactivity is minimal and everything feels so "Old-Gen". The car damage on the other hand is great and affects your driving. Performance wise, there isn't any SLI profile yet in the latest Nvidia drivers, therefore only one core of our GTX295 was used.

When we tried to enable SLI with AFR2, we saw a 50% usage in both cores. Still, this is not ideal so we really need a proper SLI profile. With only one core, we run the game with constant 60fps @ 1600x1200 + Max Details + 2xAA + 16xAF. With 4xAA, we noticed some slowdowns. So if you have a GTX275, you'll enjoy it at high resolutions, provided you don't activate the AA. Everyone else should simply lower the settings or the resolution, unless you can enjoy it with 30fps.

At the end of the day, WRC 2010 performs well on PC, although it needs a pretty strong GPU for a constant 60fps experience. The graphics don't justify these requirements and there isn't any proper SLI profile for it. Still, it's the closest thing we'll ever get to a sequel of Richard Burns Rally. And that says a lot!