The Saints Row 2022 launch represents a reboot of the collection, with developer Volition aiming to get again to its roots, or one thing like that. It seems like a contemporary mix between Grand Theft Auto and Mafia, with out a number of the silliness that some might really feel ran amuck within the final couple of installments. We’re not right here to speak in regards to the recreation and story a lot; fairly, we’re specializing in efficiency for the PC launch. We have examined lots of the finest graphics playing cards at quite a lot of settings and resolutions to seek out out what you possibly can anticipate.
Saints Row System Necessities
The official Saints Row PC system necessities from Volition aren’t too unhealthy. The minimal advice consists of a Core i3-3240 or Ryzen 3 1200 CPU, 8GB of reminiscence, and a GeForce GTX 970 or Radeon RX 480. Whereas it seems you want at the least 4GB of VRAM to run the sport acceptably, we examined decrease spec playing cards and located that is not essentially the case, although greater settings will definitely profit from having at the least 4GB.
Transferring as much as greater settings and body charges, as common, necessitates higher {hardware}, with the GTX 1070 or RX 5700 really useful for 1080p medium at 60 fps, RTX 2080 or RX 6700 XT for 1440p excessive at 60 fps, and the RTX 3080 Ti or RX 6800 XT for 4K extremely at 60 fps. We suspect that the final a type of will want a brand new AMD driver, nonetheless, as even the RX 6950 XT barely managed 60 fps at 4K extremely.
AMD has a promotion the place consumers of sure Ryzen CPUs and Radeon graphics playing cards can get Saints Row totally free, which could entail a certain quantity of developer optimizations focusing on AMD {hardware}. We obtained early entry to Saints Row and have examined with AMD’s 22.8.1 drivers alongside Nvidia’s 516.94 drivers, neither of that are explicitly Sport Prepared for Saints Row. Surprisingly, the one drivers that particularly point out Saints Row come from Intel, however they’re just for the Arc A380 GPU — built-in graphics customers are nonetheless caught with an older launch.
Saints Row Settings Evaluation
Saints Row contains a number of settings you possibly can tweak, almost 20 graphics choices, plus a couple of others. There are 4 presets as properly, Low, Medium, Excessive, and Extremely, providing fast changes that may suffice for most individuals. If you would like extra data, although, we have run via all the person settings and in contrast efficiency towards the Extremely preset, turning every all the way down to the minimal worth — or enabling ray tracing in a single occasion.
TOM’S HARDWARE 2022 GPU TEST PC
We have used the Radeon RX 6750 XT and GeForce RTX 3070 for our settings comparability, two GPUs that carry out equally in our GPU benchmarks hierarchy the place the 6750 XT is 1.4% sooner at 1080p Extremely. We’re testing at 1440p Extremely because the baseline, to be able to decrease any potential CPU bottlenecks.
Curiously, at the least with the preview code and present drivers, the RTX 3070 outperforms the RX 6750 XT by 13%, regardless of this being an AMD-promoted recreation. Last code and up to date drivers may in fact change the standings, and as Saints Row lacks a built-in benchmark, we manually ran via a sequence within the recreation for our testing. That may end up in barely extra variability, maybe as a lot as 3%, although we did take a look at every setting a number of instances to get rid of any outliers.
Beginning with the presets, dropping to Excessive improved efficiency by round 10% on Nvidia and by 18% on AMD, and so far as visuals go there’s little or no distinction between the 2. The Medium preset does begin to have a visual affect, on the similar time delivering a 42% enchancment in Nvidia fps and a 54% increase to AMD’s GPU. Lastly, the Low preset (which drops almost each setting to the minimal worth, apart from antialiasing) offers a 62% increase to Nvidia and an 81% improve to AMD — with the 2 playing cards now successfully tied.
The sum of the entire is bigger than the person settings on this case, as many of the choices have a comparatively minor affect on efficiency. Solely Shadow High quality, Undergrowth, Display House Reflections, HBAO, and Movement Blur present greater than a 4% increase to our measured FPS, and even that wasn’t constant throughout GPU distributors. Nvidia’s RTX 3070 solely advantages from the primary two. Antialiasing, Scene Element, and Texture Filtering High quality additionally registered a 3% enchancment on AMD’s RX 6750 XT, however once more there’s probably a 3% margin of error.
The one setting that does not get enabled by default is Raytraced Ambient Occlusion, which improves the standard of native shadowing at the price of 15–25% efficiency, relying in your GPU. You possibly can set RTAO to low, medium, excessive, or extremely, and in our expertise the final two choices are principally placebo — you may get almost the identical end result with medium RTAO with much less of an affect on framerates.
You possibly can view full-size photos for every of the settings within the above gallery, although with preview code it is potential that a number of the settings aren’t functioning as anticipated. World Illumination for instance tends to be a comparatively demanding setting, however with the sport model we examined, it did not appear to do something, whereas Display House Reflections appeared to affect a number of the similar stuff you’d see with World Illumination. We’ll replace our findings as soon as we’ve the preliminary public launch later this week.
We have supplied two units of screenshots, one from exterior your own home house that higher illustrates a number of the shadow and lighting results, and one other close to the water. Because of the dynamic time of day, crowds, and autos, there can be slight variations between the photographs, so give attention to the areas of the scene that do not change a lot. The pictures are labeled, however you may discover many seem almost an identical to the default Extremely preset.
Saints Row GPU Efficiency
Transferring on to the benchmarks, we have examined twelve totally different graphics playing cards, plus Intel’s built-in Iris Xe (on a Core i7-1165G7 laptop computer). These span the spectrum from ultra-budget GPUs from six years in the past just like the GTX 1050, up via the newest and biggest GPUs just like the RTX 3090 Ti and RX 6950 XT. We have additionally examined Intel’s new Arc A380 graphics card, a contemporary finances answer.
Beginning with built-in options and older low-end {hardware}, Intel’s Iris Xe fails to succeed in playable ranges of efficiency, whereas AMD’s RX 550 4GB — a GPU that is related in efficiency to the built-in Vega 8 Graphics options — plugs alongside at an inexpensive 45 fps at 720p, however falls to twenty-eight fps at 1080p. The Arc A380 and GTX 1050 had no critical troubles with 720p or 1080p on the recreation’s lowest settings.
Bumping to 1080p medium, solely the RX 550 fails to interrupt 30 fps — and naturally it might be joined by Intel’s built-in graphics, which we did not take a look at at medium since they already received 15 fps at low. The RX 6500 XT and GTX 1650 Tremendous each simply clear 60 fps, with the RTX 3070 and above breaking the 144 fps mark. AMD GPUs have a slight lead in a couple of instances, however usually talking the playing cards land about the place we might anticipate.
Saints Row at 1080p Extremely begins to tax finances GPUs, doubtless as a result of they do not have sufficient VRAM. The GTX 1650 Tremendous simply barely clears 30 fps, whereas the 6500 XT and Arc A380 come up quick, and the GTX 1050 efficiency drops considerably from 1080p medium as a result of its solely having 2GB VRAM. RTX 2060 and above nonetheless break 60 fps, although, which suggests most midrange and above GPUs of the previous 4 years can be simply high-quality.
At 1440p, solely the RX 6750 XT and above break 60 fps, and you’ll see that the Nvidia playing cards usually outpace their AMD counterparts now, with the RTX 3070 main the 6750 XT by 7%. Sport Prepared drivers from each corporations is perhaps sufficient to alter the standings barely, however we might anticipate related efficiency enhancements from either side. The RX 6950 XT and RTX 3090 Ti each common greater than 120 fps as properly, for these with greater refresh charge 1440p gaming screens.
4K Extremely stays playable on the RX 6750 XT and above, however solely the RX 6950 XT and RTX 3090 Ti — and certain the RTX 3080 Ti and above — break 60 fps. That is not too shocking, however the lack of any type of upscaling on a contemporary recreation launch is a bit uncommon lately. As an AMD-promoted recreation, we might wish to see FSR 2.0 added, which might make 4K gaming potential for lots extra GPUs.
Saints Row Ray Tracing Efficiency
Saints Row solely contains one ray tracing impact, Raytraced Ambient Occlusion. It creates extra correct localized shadows, for a modest hit to efficiency. One of the best instance of what RTAO does in comparison with the default HBAO will be seen within the following gallery, in areas that will be within the shadow of objects above them.
With out RTAO, there are a lot of areas that ought to be considerably shadowed, like underneath the awning on the constructing and the AC unit on the truck. Even the bottom stage of RTAO makes issues look extra reasonable, for a comparatively small hit to efficiency. Every extra stage of RTAO darkens the shadowed areas barely, however the visible good points are fairly minor and you’ll definitely get by with the low or medium RTAO settings.
The efficiency affect of RTAO finally ends up being round 10–25% for many GPUs, although the RX 6500 XT takes a a lot bigger 47% hit to efficiency, even at medium high quality (for each the preset and RTAO). The RTX 3090 Ti nonetheless squeaks previous the 60 fps mark at 4K and maxed out settings, however because it’s sometimes round 10% sooner than the following closest GPU (RTX 3090), it is most likely the one card that may constantly achieve this proper now.
We might most likely go away RTAO off until you are already utilizing at the least the Excessive international preset, after which if in case you have sufficient headroom you may bump RTAO to low or medium and nonetheless get an inexpensive mix of efficiency and picture high quality.
Saints Row 2022: Closing Ideas
Efficiency utilizing the preview construct of Saints Row was usually good, supplied you do not simply max out all of the settings on a midrange card and hope for 60 fps or extra. In fact, if in case you have a high-end card just like the RTX 3060 Ti or RX 6700 XT or higher, you will get away with that strategy at 1080p, however most players will wish to tune a couple of settings and follow the Excessive preset.
Anybody aware of the collection ought to discover loads to love. It may not be fairly as ridiculous because the earlier launch, Saints Row IV, however graphics have come a good distance up to now 9 years. Personally, I discovered loads to take pleasure in whereas operating round Santo Ileso, the fictional metropolis of the sport world, and there are nonetheless loads of shenanigans and hijinx to maintain you entertained.
CPU and GPU necessities ought to be properly inside attain of any gaming PC constructed throughout the previous 5 or extra years. Based mostly on what we noticed with our restricted testing, even an outdated GTX 970, which got here out in 2014, ought to handle simply high-quality at 1080p medium. It may not get a gradual 60 fps, however it’s sometimes 50–80% sooner than a GTX 1050, which managed 1080p Low with none critical issue.
Saints Row launches on August 23, 2022, solely on the Epic Video games Retailer for PC customers. It is also obtainable on Xbox and PlayStation. Volition supplied us with a pre-release copy for functions of this technical overview.
