Frostpunk 2 PC Performance Analysis

Last month, 11 bit Studios released its new society survival game, Frostpunk 2. And I know, I know. This PC Performance Analysis is a bit late. However, a lot of games came out these past couple of weeks. Anyway, powered by Unreal Engine 5, it’s time to benchmark it and examine its performance on the PC platform.

For our benchmarks, we used an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 32GB of DDR5 at 6000Mhz, AMD’s Radeon RX580, RX Vega 64, RX 6900XT, RX 7900XTX, NVIDIA’s GTX980Ti, RTX 2080Ti, RTX 3080 and RTX 4090. We also used Windows 10 64-bit, the GeForce 561.09, and the Radeon Adrenalin Edition 24.20.11.01 drivers. Moreover, we’ve disabled the second CCD on our 7950X3D.

11 bit Studios has added a respectable amount of graphics settings to tweak. PC gamers can adjust the quality of Textures, Terrain, Shadows, Lighting and more. The game also supports NVIDIA DLSS 3, AMD FSR 3.0 and Intel XeSS. You can find our DLSS 3 vs FSR 3.0 benchmarks here.

Frostpunk 2 does not feature any built-in benchmark tool. So, for our benchmarks, we used the third location (Broken Shore) from the Utopia Builder. That mission has a large area. Thus, it should give us a pretty good idea of how the game runs.

Frostpunk 2 requires a high-end GPU for gaming on Ultra settings, even at 1080p. Since this is a GPU-bound title, we won’t have any CPU benchmarks. From what we’ve seen, a mid-tier CPU is enough for gaming with over 60FPS, provided you are not limited by your GPU.

So, at 1080p/Ultra Settings, the only GPUs that could push framerates higher than 60FPS were the AMD Radeon RX 7900XTX and the NVIDIA RTX 4090. Yup, all the other GPUs, like the NVIDIA RTX 3080 or the AMD Radeon RX 6900XT were unable to come close to 60FPS.

At Native 1440p on Ultra Settings, the only GPU that could offer framerates higher than 60FPS was the NVIDIA RTX 4090. And as for Native 4K, there is no GPU that can run Frostpunk 2 smoothly.

Now the good news here is that the game is scalable. At Native 4K/Medium Settings, our NVIDIA RTX 4090 was able to push framerates higher than 70FPS at all times. Then, on Low Settings, we saw framerates higher than 120FPS.

And I know what some of you will say. “Medium settings on the NVIDIA RTX 4090 at Native 4K? This is blasphemy.” Well, hear me out. Frostpunk 2 looks great even on Medium Settings. To be honest, the Medium Settings feel like the High Settings that other UE5 games use. To prove my point, here are two screenshots on Medium Settings (with Ultra Textures). You can’t possibly tell me that they look bad. In fact, I could have easily passed them as “High” screenshots.

What I’m saying is that “Medium” is just a word. It does not mean that the Medium Settings in Frostpunk 2 are similar to those of other games that look awful on Medium Settings. Again, the game looks great on Medium Settings. So, get over the “settings” ego as you can optimize your settings to get great visuals and performance.

Before closing, I should note that the game suffers from some stuttering issues. These don’t appear to be shader compilation stutters. I was able to replicate those stutters multiple times. For instance, you can get stutters while rotating the camera with the “Q” or “E” keys, each and every time you launch a map.

All in all, Frostpunk 2 is a very demanding PC game on Ultra Settings. As I said, though, you can improve performance by lowering your settings. The game will still look great even on Medium Settings. And, if you don’t want to lower your settings, you can use DLSS 3 if you own an RTX GPU. AMD FSR 3.0 is not that good in this title. FSR 3.0 Super Resolution still has major visual artifacts. Also, FSR 3.0 FG still suffers from major framepacing issues. So, avoid AMD FSR 3.0 and use Intel XeSS.

Enjoy!

John Papadopoulos

John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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