Formula 1 drivers need to be at the peak of fitness to cope with the demands that racing places on their bodies. The F1 games are likewise very demanding, with the realistic physics, lighting, and weather providing a challenge for graphics cards. This makes titles such as the soon-to-be-released (on May 30th) F1 25 a good candidate for benchmarking the latest GPUs.

Thanks to early benchmark reviews, we can see that F1 25 allows gamers to run the game on a wide range of hardware, whether you’re team Nvidia, AMD, or Intel. Plus, ray tracing isn’t a requirement (like we see in DOOM: The Dark Ages).

F1 25 has all the upscaling and ray tracing options you need

German publication ComputerBase has been one of the places benchmarking the game just ahead of release. We can see that it offers an excellent selection of upscaling and ray tracing options that all other AAA devs should really strive for as standard.

The inclusion of support for Temporal Upscaling, which not only includes support for Nvidia DLSS 4, including Ray Reconstruction, Super Resolution, and Frame Generation, but also support for AMD FSR 4 Super Resolution and Frame Generation, and even Intel Arc XeSS features. Ray Tracing is likewise fully supported, with Global Illumination, reflections. Shadow, Ambient Occlusion, and Full Ray Tracing.

Perhaps thanks to this extensive feature set, the ComputerBase benchmarks found that AMD Radeon graphics cards performed consistently faster than their Nvidia counterparts. For example, the RX 9070 XT was 6% faster than the RTX 5070 Ti using Ultra HD settings. This is while running at the ultra-high preset with FSR in Quality mode.

Though we can expect to see a lot of F1 25 in future benchmarks, there are some teething problems. ComputerBase was not fully able to do ‘like-for-like' tests due to a bug with the FSR 4 implementation, which is causing problems with AI upsampling. Likewise, ray tracing reflections on AMD and Nvidia cards are currently using different settings and cannot be directly compared.

Both these problems are due to be addressed in a future patch, at which point we can get a clearer picture of what to expect.

About the Author

Rebecca Hills-Duty

Writing and journalism experience at VRFocus, UploadVR, The Escapist, HTC, PC Gamer, Tech Radar+ and Dexerto. Can sometimes be found playing with retro tech.