F1 2022 Is Out With Beautiful Ray-Traced Cars And The Same Sweet Benchmark Mode
To be honest, your author here isn't a racing guy—but our Editor In Chief, Dave Altavilla has been playing with it for his forthcoming review of a Maingear Vybe gaming PC he has on tap. In the meantime, have a look at this Hot Lap video posted by the game's developers and admire the gorgeous ray-traced graphics:
Besides the updates to all the car models for the new real-life designs, F1 22 includes a bunch of other new and updated content. Miami International Autodrome joins the track list, while Circuit de Barcelona, Melbourne Grand Prix, and Yas Marina Circuits all got updated to match the current real-world layouts. There's a new F1 Sprint mode, and this year's revision also adds an Immersive feature that, among other things, lets you completely control your car during Safety Car periods.
F1 22 expands on the game's features outside of the core of F1 racing simulation, too. You can customize your driver and even your living space, including casual clothing, furniture, lighting, and a personal vehicle. You can also take these supercars onto the tracks in a special "Pirelli Hot Laps" mode.
What hasn't changed much from the last generation is the performance. F1 21 is beloved as a system performance test because it works GPU pretty well and also utilizes some of the latest visual effects like ray tracing, but can still produce high framerates that can also be suitable for smoothness/frame pacing and CPU testing. You can see a benchmark of the previous game on a powerful Maingear Vybe gaming PC here:
F1 22 continues the tradition, so here's a preview of Dave's upcoming review that employs the new racing sim for his gaming system benchmarks:
Most of the performance difference can be chalked up to the higher-detail cars and environments as well as a few improved ray-traced effects. Indeed, the ray-tracing puts the hurt on our test system's Radeon RX 6950 XT, which skirts the border of playability in native 4K. The game rather proudly supports NVIDIA's DLSS; hopefully someone can convince Codemasters to drop in AMD's FSR 2.0 upscaling as well—supposedly, it only takes 5 minutes.
You can grab F1 2022 on Steam for the usual $60.
