Teardown is a massive, destructible, physics-filled game with raytracing. You might expect it
to require a monster PC to run. But you’d be pleasantly surprised.
On steam, an i7 and a Geforce 1080 is recommended and it says the minimum requirements are a
quad-core CPU and a Geforce 1060. But I found it could run well- and still look good- on
computers significantly slower than those.
This comes down to 2 things. Firstly, you don’t need 60 FPS in Teardown for it to
be playable. And secondly, the slow down tends to occur when the ‘gameplay’ doesn’t.
I’ll explain more about that in a bit. And before you ask ‘can you disable raytracing’,
the answer is no, you can’t. But luckily for you, raytracing in voxel-based games like
Teardown is a lot less demanding than in ‘normal’ games, so the framerate tax isn’t as great
as you might expect. Plus, this game’s got all sorts of cool tech and clever tricks to
make the game look good while running well.
Let’s start with the RAM, because that’s simple. It says it requires 4 GB to run, but
I’d say you should have 8 just to be on the safe side, and let’s be honest, if your
PC has less than that then your other components will probably be old enough to be equally
limiting. So RAM shouldn’t be a problem- even in a game with millions of voxels bouncing
about. In my testing, my PC was always using more than the required 4 GB, but quite a bit
less than 8. I’ve always assumed that RAM is one of those magical things where your
PC is happy to use up whatever you have, but when you’re close to running out it’ll
quickly reallocate it and free up some out of thin air. So maybe 4 GB is fine.
Now onto the graphics card. A geforce 1080 is probably a good bet if you want a solid
60 FPS at 1080p, high settings. But in my testing, I felt that 40 was fine with Teardown
to make it feel responsive and fluid. Which drops the requirements quite a bit! And even
more so if you don’t mind dropping the settings or resolution. Which both make significant
improvements to the framerate.
Unfortunately, my testing is limited since my copy of Teardown is incompatible with AMD
cards. I tested all sorts and they all suffered the same, invisible world bug. I let Tuxedolabs
know and in short, it must have been something that broke recently, and it should be pretty
simple to fix. So it’s pretty safe to say the game will also run on AMD cards come release
day. But it DOES mean that I’ll be limited to
testing Nvidia cards for this part of the video. And this is unfortunate since I only
have 4 GB Nvidia cards, so I’m unable to say whether 3 or even 2 GB graphics cards
are up to the task. My heart says they would be, but my brain says that I shouldn’t tell
you that because it might come back to bite me later.
There are 2 things to help you out- the first is to lower the ‘Render Quality’, which
will noticeably improve your framerates, but will drop certain effects. The drop from High
to Medium makes the raytracing a bit noisier, lowers the quality of reflections, and removes
some lights and reflections from some of the less polished surfaces. But it’s not a HUGE
difference. The drop to low is a bit bigger, it disables glass reflections, turns off volumetric
fog entirely and makes the lighting less detailed. I WOULD say it’s a big drop, but if I’m
honest, until comparing these scenes, I had only spotted the fog had gone and that the
lighting was a bit grainier. BUT, if you want to keep all of these effects
on, you’re in luck- because there’s another thing you can do that will boost framerates
even more, and that’s to dabble with the resolution scaling. At 100%, it will run at
whatever your PC is set to- for most of this video, that’s 1080p. 75% looks noticeably
blurrier, but runs a lot faster. And the 50% scaling is there as a last resort. Even at
native, Teardown’s visuals are already quite soft looking, it would be great if a sharpening
option was implemented to claw back some of the clarity. But as it is, 50% resolution
scaling looks horrible, but at least with it you’ll get great FPS even on graphics
cards that are almost a decade old. Incredible really, when you consider it’s doing RAYTRACING.
The slowest card I tested with a Geforce 680 with 4GB of VRAM. This was high-end… 8 years
ago. I don’t know where this particular card came from, I just found it on my desk
one day. And I’m pretty sure most 680’s are 2 GB, so I don’t know where this freak
of nature came from. But whatever.
At 1080p, high settings and native resolution, the game wasn’t playable. The framerate
averaged somewhere in the mid-high 20’s, with drops to low 20’s when stuff actually
happened. I would not recommend playing the game like this as it felt unresponsive and
did hamper the experience. But hey, it is at least running! And console players might
be okay with it.
Dropping the setting to MEDIUM raised the general framerate to above 30, with drops
to mid-high 20’s. It doesn’t sound great but I did actually feel it was playable for
the most part, bar a few laggy segments when action occurred. At these sorts of framerates,
every frame helps and disabling DOF and motion blur clawed back another frame or so. If you
capped the game to 30 FPS, you can play Teardown at this setting. But the low framerate does
bring out the anti-aliasing artifacts around stuff like moving cables, so the experience
is far from perfect. Finally, dropping the detail to low raised
the framerate to the high 30’s, and low 40’s, but intense action would still drop
it below 30. Despite that, the game felt acceptably responsive and if I had no other option, playing
the game like this wouldn’t be too painful a compromise. But I’d try and avoid smoke,
which still managed to make the framerate drop to juddery levels.
So far we’ve only considered altering the detail setting. But lowering the resolution
makes an even bigger difference. Setting resolution scaling to 75% does make the game noticeably
blurrier. But that might be worth it, if you’re gaming on an older PC and would rather have
blur than grain. Even on high settings, at 75% resolution scaling
the game ran in the high 40’s and low 50’s. So consider this to be the next thing to try
if 100% resolution with low settings still isn’t quite responsive enough for you. I
didn’t feel much need to drop things further than this, even on an 8 year old Geforce 680.
But I did. For science. Low settings, 75% resolution scaling pretty
much obtained 60 FPS. In fact, it was then that I realised the PC was capped at 60 FPS
while capturing this footage. Later I tested again and found it to hover between 60 and
100 FPS, dropping to the 50’s when in vehicles, and with one-frame stutters when destroying
things sometimes. And destruction would sometimes briefly drop it to the 30’s. But it was
still okay. And last, at 50% scaling the game ran above
60 FPS almost all the time, even at high settings. It felt perfectly smooth, but was blurred
to oblivion. This kind of resolution is too low for my liking.
Moving on to a Geforce 970, which isn’t TOO dissimilar to the game’s minimum requirements
of a Geforce 1060. And some people would argue this card only has 3.5 GB of VRAM, since that
last half a gig was slower stuff. But I’ve never really seen conclusive evidence that
this really impacted the card’s performance in-game. As far as I’m concerned, a Geforce
970 is still a decent budget card and it made Teardown feel acceptably smooth even at native
1080p resolution. At high settings it ran between 40-50 FPS,
which was very playable. Explosions and stuff brought it down into the 30s, and only smoke
got it to drop below that. You might look at these numbers and think that they’re
a bit on the low side, but it felt smooth enough to be playable with enough overhead
to handle the action. This is how I’d probably play with the 970.
But if you really want smooth, low settings will tease a 60 FPS average, and 75% resolution
scaling will guarantee it. Instead of dropping the resolution, though,
I instead upped it to 1440p. Because why not. On low settings, it still managed in the region
of high 30’s / low 40’s. The motion blur effect was pronounced, and it obviously wasn’t
as responsive as at 1080p. But it kept above 30 fps provided I avoided thick smoke. Not
bad for a raytraced game.
And last, a Geforce 1660 Super, with 6 GB of VRAM. This is still below the recommended
spec. It’s more in-line with a Geforce 1070, which Dennis recommended for Teardown at 1080p
with 75% resolution scaling if you want a solid 60 FPS.
But like I’ve said, I’m happy with framerates a tad lower than that, and found this card
to handle 1080p, high settings no matter what I was doing. At its worst it would drop as
low as 40 fps during destruction or smoke but it wasn’t noticeably slow. So while
60 fps is a nice target to aim for, the 1660 Super gets the ‘Philip seal of approval’
for playing Teardown at full 1080p, high settings. Though maybe the rest of the game will be
more intensive, I don’t know. I tried 1440p. High detail is still ‘cinematic’,
but low is perfectly smooth and enjoyable and still looks great. In short: a 1660 Super
easily manages 1080 at high, or 1440p at lower settings.
So in conclusion, when he recommends a Geforce 1080 for 1080p gaming, that’s for an almost-solid
60 FPS experience. But you DON’T need that to enjoy Teardown smoothly. Provided you’re
willing to turn the resolution down a bit more, you can even get a decent experience
on a graphics card from 8 years ago. It really depends how far you’re willing to drop the
resolution.
And last, I tested the CPU. Up till now I’ve been using fast 6 and 8 core CPUs which don’t
struggle with the game at all. So to test the CPU I moved to my Ryzen 2200G. 2 years
ago, I said that this made an excellent, affordable budget gaming PC, so now in 2020 there’s
no reason for you to be using anything less powerful than this.
The reason this footage looks terrible is because I’m running on lowest settings simply
to make the game CPU-limited. What you need to look at is the framerate. Even this budget
CPU can run the game at well beyond 100 FPS. And this isn’t even a particularly FAST
quad core these days. Provided you have an i5 or newer i3, or any Ryzen CPU, it’ll
handle Teardown brilliantly. I’ll admit, I did manage to break it, but only after setting
fire to multiple buildings, and chucking dozens of pipebombs everywhere. It’s not a realistic
scenario in-game. And let’s face it- if you do this, you’re kind of asking for poor
performance. In general gameplay and destruction, the quad core CPU didn’t struggle at all.
So what if I disable one of the cores? Now armed with a 3-core CPU, the game was
still running well beyond 100 FPS. It could survive me driving vehicles into buildings,
but problems arose when I threw multiple pipebombs at the same time. Moderate levels of destruction
would be enough to max out the 3 cores and to tank performance. But in most cases, it
would recover quickly, returning to triple digits.
A triple-core CPU isn’t ideal. I think quad cores are sensible for this game. But bear
with me here- I think you could get away with a modern, hypothetical 3 core CPU provided
you play this game the way you’re supposed to. That is, you blow stuff up, wait for the
dust to settle and the framerate to recover, and THEN you do the timetrial or whatever
goal it is you have to accomplish. Do that and it should remain perfectly playable when
you need it to be. But yes, having that extra 4th core is a nice thing to have.
And last, I dropped it down to 2 cores because I just had to. It was kind of like 3, only
even easier to break. Small destruction remained okay, but driving a vehicle into a building
ruined performance, and it remained low for longer. Don’t play this game on a 2-core
CPU. I didn’t test with multithreading.
In conclusion I’ve been left pleasantly surprised by how forgiving Teardown is on
older and slower systems. Had this game come out 5 years ago, it would have been considered
demanding, but still quite playable on most gaming systems. A quad core is nice to have,
but a lower than 1080p resolution opens this game up to players with systems that are significantly
slower than this game’s so-called ‘minimum specs’.
And last, I returned to my fastest PC to see how it ran at 4K. This is with a Ryzen 3700X
and Geforce 2080 TI, which is pretty much the fastest graphics card in the world…
but not for long. 1440p was no trouble for this machine at all,
it was easily above 60 FPS- at least, until the destruction reached ridiculous levels.
But it didn’t have quite the power required to run Teardown at 4K, 60 FPS. It was ‘playable’
but perhaps not as smooth as it could have been. I’ll end this video with a few minutes
of Teardown, running at 4K, high settings. Enjoy!