F1 2017 – Vulkan Performance Review

Disclosure: The developer provided us a free Steam game code for review purpose.

F1 2017 is an official FIA (Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile) Formula One game developed by Codemasters using the EGO game engine. It was originally released for Windows last August 25, 2017 then brought to Linux by Feral Interactive on November 2, 2017. F1 2017 is the first game to only use Vulkan on Linux.

Features

• Choose from a wide range of Championships that follow different rules and structures.
• Drive legendary F1 cars from five historic teams – Ferrari, McLaren, Renault and Williams.
• Race online against Linux, macOS and Windows players with a full grid of 20 cars.

Performance

Like DiRT Rally, F1 2017 caters to a wide audience in terms of required hardware. A budget gaming PC like what we featured in our PhP 26,000 Gaming PC Build Guide for November 2017 should be enough to play this game at 1080p using High detail preset.

The game features a lot of image quality settings and performance scales well adjustments. Users of former mainstream GPU’s such as the GeForce GTX 970 would be delighted to know that they can enjoy this game on affordable gaming monitors such as the ZOWIE BenQ XL2411.

We used to recommend to stick with NVIDIA GeForce for playing games on Linux because AMD Radeon used to perform poorly on Linux. Things are different now and AMD Radeon is finally becoming a viable gaming option when using Mesa. As shown below, Radeon RX 480 8GB is suited for running F1 2017 on ultrawide gaming monitors such as the LG 34UC79G-B.

The game only officially supports Ubuntu 17.04 but I did not encounter any game crash or serious issue on my gaming PC running on Ubuntu MATE 17.04.

Feral Interactive has done a great job of porting this game to Linux. F1 2017 only uses Vulkan on Linux and it further strengthens the image of Linux as a gaming platform.

Supported Input Devices

You probably wouldn’t want to play this game using a keyboard. The list below shows gamepads and steering wheels that are officially supported.

I was only able to test the Microsoft Xbox 360 wired gamepad and it worked great out-of-the-box.

Closing Thoughts

I’m not a big fan of Formula One but I enjoy playing F1 2017. There are many game modes available to keep you busy outside its career mode. Though, I am not a race car driver, I can say that the driving physics is more of a racing simulation. You cannot go into corners while turning and fully braking at the same time. There are various racing assist settings you can tweak to match your skill level. For the best experience, turn off all racing assist settings then drive using a steering wheel setup.

F1 2017 should be on your games-to-buy list if you are a fan of racing or if you are looking for a great game you can play on a budget gaming PC. It is available at Steam for PhP 1,439.95 and at The Feral Store for $59.99. Steam Play is supported which means you only buy F1 2017 once and you can play it on Linux, macOS, and Windows.

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