I was waiting impatiently play I've been playing Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 for a long time now, but I'd convinced myself that the performance test would make some of my low-end graphics cards jitter in their PCIe slots. All those 'Nids' on the screen, right? And that stutter in the latest preview build? Certainly enough to make a Tech-Priest shed at least one greasy tear.
But no, it turned out to be good. Quite good, in fact – perhaps not at the level where you'd need to tackle Space Marine 2 on an old laptop (or, for the record, a Steam Deck), but it runs smoothly on minimum specs and is noticeably more stable than it was in this preview. The only thing that might upset your machine's soul are some quality setting quirks, where lowering or increasing the graphics options can produce inconsistent results.
So be warned that this might be a 'hit DLSS/FSR and be done' kind of thing if faster frame rates are what you're after. But we'll get to that later; first, here's a new post-launch status report on how Space Marine 2 performs on different hardware.
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 PC performance and system requirements
I don't know when every AAA game studio got together to agree that an Intel Core i5-8600K, Nvidia GTX 1060, and AMD RX 580 should be the standard minimum specs for everything, but at least there are no nasty surprises here. I'd mainly recommend paying attention to the SSD requirement: Space Marine 2 is mostly playable on a hard drive, but I got 3-4 minute loading times and out-of-sync lip flaps during cutscenes when I tried it. There were also some micro-stuttering that just isn't present on an SSD.
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 minimum specs (1080p/30fps)
- Operating System: Windows 10/11 64 bit
- PROCESSOR: AMD Ryzen 5 2600X / Intel Core i5-8600K
- DATA STORE: 8GB RAM
- Graphics Card: 6GB Graphics Card, AMD Radeon RX 580 / Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060
- DirectX: Version 12
- Storing: 75 GB available space, SSD required
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 recommended specs (1080p/60fps)
- Operating System: Windows 10/11 64 bit
- PROCESSOR: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X / Intel Core i7-12700
- DATA STORE: 16GB RAM
- Graphics Card: 8 GB Graphics Card, AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT / Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070
- DirectX: Version 12
- Storing: 75 GB available space, SSD required
Indeed, arm yourself with the right storage and the likelihood of stuttering, stuttering or otherwise failing in this launch version seems to be greatly reduced. Furthermore, in all my hours of playing and benchmarking I only experienced one crash, and that was in the main menu – Space Marine 2 feels impressively robust from a technological standpoint for a game that regularly fills your monitor with hundreds of squeaking, particle-effect-spewing aliens.
PC-specific features don’t go much beyond the basics, with Nvidia DLSS and AMD FSR 2 present and accurate, but their frame-production equivalents (DLSS 3 and FSR 3) aren’t. Ultrawide support doesn’t seem to be quite ready yet either – the game’s DLC roadmap suggests it’s coming in late September. Still, Space Marine 2 should be able to run well on older PC hardware, up to and including a minimum-spec GTX 1060. Using one particularly combat-heavy early mission as a benchmark, I saw this card average 39fps on the Low preset when running TAA natively at 1080p. That’s 9fps higher than the official target, and in Quality mode, it increased to a smoother 49fps with the FSR boost.
The RTX 3070 in recommended spec also lived up to expectations, scoring 67fps at native 1080p with Ultra settings. This is a good GPU for 1440p too: I got 60fps at native resolution, still on the Ultra preset, and this increased to 66fps when I replaced TAA with DLSS at the Quality level.
Of all the hardware I tried, the only one that definitely fell flat against the Tyranid hordes and effect storms was the Steam Deck. Sometimes It could manage 30fps on the Low preset and in FSR 2 Performance mode, but it dropped into the twenties too often to be comfortable. There's a faster tier of FSR, Ultra Performance, but the standard Performance setting was already blurring detail to the point where text and prompts were unreadable, so reducing quality further isn't really a viable solution.
At least more powerful handhelds like the Asus ROG Ally X can get by with the resolution set to 720p. And the lower-end kit won't necessarily force you to the lowest settings, as my RTX 4050-powered gaming laptop produced a playable 36fps at Medium/1080p without the boost.
Similarly, you don't need absolute top-of-the-line hardware for higher resolutions. Alongside the RTX 3070's spirited 1440p efforts, the RTX 4070 Ti, which Nvidia markets as its Quad HD engine, managed to hit 63fps at 4K, aided by DLSS on the Quality preset at Ultra. That's just a few frames shy of the RTX 4090's 69fps at the same settings. Still, when I dropped the RTX 4070 Ti back down to 1440p duty, I noticed it only went from 63fps to 67fps, with all other settings unchanged. This suggests that Space Marine 2's performance is largely CPU-reliant rather than entirely GPU-reliant, so make sure both components are up to par if you want to avoid a fancy graphics card becoming a bottleneck.
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 best settings guide
Space Marine 2's generally effortless preset performance makes it less important to spend time tweaking settings, which is a good thing, because ehhhh, uhhhh, ummm. How do I put it: you know how in most games, dropping from the highest settings to the lowest will make everything less pretty, but will significantly increase the frame rate? Space Marine 2 tries an innovative new approach from Not That, where the Low preset is only selectively less detailed than Ultra, and therefore only runs slightly faster.
If your PC has a newer/more powerful CPU than the Core i5-11600K in my test rig you might see bigger differences, but with an RTX 4060 at native 1080p, I managed 63fps on all Ultra settings, rising to just 70fps on Low, with 65fps on High and 67fps on Medium, for what it's worth. This makes it a challenge to find the best combination of individual settings, as each option will only provide a tiny pinch of extra frames, if any.
For the sake of completeness – and let’s face it, I haven’t written anything about RPS in over two weeks – I’ll still explain how each setting affects performance. Specifically, I’ll talk about how they change the 63fps result on Ultra…
Render resolution/Resolution increase: This is arguably your best bet for polishing up your performance. Switching from native-res TAA to DLSS upscaling in Quality mode pushed the RTX 4060 up to 68fps – a result that evenly matched FSR 2 in Quality mode.
Motion blur intensity: This doesn't affect performance either way, so you can turn it off if you wish.
Texture filtering: Here the difference between Ultra and Low was just 1 fps in favour of the latter.
Texture resolution: Again, dropping from Ultra to Low only provided a small improvement of 1fps, so it's not worth the cut. The only exception might be if you're low on VRAM, in which case High is fine.
Shadows: This proved to be one of the most impactful settings to drop, but even going from Ultra to Low was only able to increase the RTX 4060's speed from 63fps to 66fps.
Screen space ambient occlusion: It might be worth leaving this one off, but not entirely. Turning SSAO off completely got me 66fps, while the Default setting was only slightly better at 65fps.
Screen space reflections: Disabling reflections bumped my RTX 4060 up to 66fps, but that's a pretty stingy increase at the cost of a visible loss of detail in certain areas. If you insist on cutting, drop it to Default instead.
Volumetric: 65fps on Low is another low-impact setting that shouldn't be cut out for anything except budget GPUs.
Effects: This also produced 65fps on Low settings.
Detail: 66fps on Low and 65fps on Medium, which is a setting you should only lower if you're really struggling.
Fabric simulation: A meager boost to 64fps on low means you can keep rocking your Astartes loincloths at maximum quality.
The annoying thing about these settings isn't so much the lack of extra performance they can unlock, but how all the small individual boosts don't add up when added together. The small differences between presets are an example of this, like when I tried to test a custom setup that cut shadows, detail, and SSAO when adding DLSS in Quality mode: all-in-all, this only got me to 68fps, which is on par with just using DLSS alone. Damn, and it's absolutely brilliant.
Essentially, there's no specific set of settings that will work wonders on a wide range of PCs. Instead, I'll suggest you start with the preset that gives you good enough performance, Later Try the following settings one by one (and in decreasing order of priority) to see if they can make Space Marine 2 run even smoother.
- Creating a resolution: Quality,
- Resolution increase: DLSS or FSR 2
- Shadows: Low
- SSAO: Default
- Screen space reflections: Default
- Detail: Middle
- Volumetric: Low
- Effects: Low
I think most GPU/CPU combinations will see no improvement after doing a few of these things, but there may still be some limited benefits on lower-end hardware.