EA Sports WRC is out now in early access, with players who pre-ordered getting a three-day head start. With veteran rally game developer Codemasters taking over from KT Racing, fans have high hopes for EA Sports WRC.
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Unfortunately, early adopters are experiencing a plethora of issues on PC from stuttering frame rates that hamper the gameplay to blurry visuals.
EA Sports WRC PC performance issues
EA Sports WRC sees Codemasters swap its in-house Ego engine for Unreal Engine 4. This engine is notoriously demanding, requiring high PC specs to run games optimally. But this engine swap under the bonnet is seemingly causing problems for PC players.
In a scathing post on X (formerly Twitter), Mouz esports driver Moritz Lohner complained that EA Sports WRC “barely hit 150 frames on quite good PC specs” in ultra-low graphics settings. Lohner added that “trees and bushes pop in a few meters before you pass them” and “everything looks blurry, washed and pixelated” with “no sharp looking objects.”
Several players are also reporting frequent stuttering and frame rate drops on Reddit even when playing on an SSD. This is not ideal in a rally game where you need quick reactions to navigate treacherous stages.
One user playing with an RTX 3070 card experienced “constant stuttering on default settings.” Others found that turning down the shader-related settings reduced the stuttering. Reducing the graphics settings to medium or low should improve performance but at the cost of graphical fidelity.
We’ve experienced stuttering when using the cockpit camera, but performance is generally smoother when using the chase camera. The game also froze for a few seconds during a crash. It's worth noting that players are experiencing these issues after Codemasters rolled out a "day 0" patch on PC and consoles.
System requirements
As a reminder, EA Sports WRC’s minimum system requirements recommend an AMD Ryzen 5 2600X Intel i5 9600K processor, 8 GB of RAM, and an Nvidia GTX 1060 Radeon RX Vega 56 graphics card.
Recommended system requirements include an AMD Ryzen 7 3700X Intel i5 10600K processor, 16 GB of RAM, and an Nvidia RTX 2070 Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics card.
You can view the full EA Sports WRC system requirements here.
What about PS5?
While EA Sports WRC is off to a bumpy start on PC, these technical problems are less prominent on consoles. From our playthrough so far on PS5, we noticed stuttering during pre and post-event cut scenes and occasional screen tearing.
Aside from that, performance is smooth on PS5, but this may vary in rally locations we haven't tried yet. Overall though, EA Sports WRC's graphics and performance seem better optimised on console.
It seems that EA Sports WRC needed some more time in the service area before being unleashed onto PC. EA is aware of stability and performance issues in Croatia, Monte Carlo, and Japan locations as well as night stages and the livery editor.
It's still in the early access period, but EA has confirmed that a post-launch patch will bring performance and stability improvements around a week after launch. The update will also add shader precompilation, which will hopefully resolve the stutter.
We’re currently putting EA Sports WRC through its paces and will be bringing you our full review soon.
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