Let us say right off the bat that the Ghostrunner Demo performance is not necessarily emblematic of the actual, full release. For all we know, optimization is still underway, and the game may well run twice as fast on its release date, due October 27th. This felt like necessary disambiguation to make because the results far as the game's RTX and DLSS implementation go have been... interesting, to say the least.

Now, it's worth pointing out that the game itself runs perfectly fine, if a tiny bit more erratically than we expected. Our tests aren't very technical at all, but we've attempted to run the Ghostrunner Demo on a fairly mediocre RTX 2060 laptop with an i5-9300H, and we were quite happy with the results overall. As a reference for our previous performance-related work, you can check out what we had to say about Death Stranding's implementation of DLSS 2.0 pre-launch. On a similar note, we do have a pretty long and in-depth performance tweak guide for low-end PCs. If you're stuck with a bad rig, consider checking it out.

Back to the topic at hand: today we aim to take a look at Ghostrunner Demo performance on said laptop. This should, in turn, allow us to set proper expectations for the game's soon-to-be release. Since this is a game that banks heavily on its ridiculous speed and the protagonist's insane agility, you do not want to run it at a low framerate. If this is the sort of thing you're interested in, read on!

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Ghostrunner PC System Requirements

The first order of business: Ghostrunner system requirements. As you may or may not know, the game's Steam page is pretty scarce in regard to setting expectations on this front. Namely, developers have only mentioned the minimum requirements so far. Not to mention that they're suspiciously low, at that. In any case, here's what information we've sourced officially!

Minimum Hardware Requirements for Ghostrunner

• OS: Windows 7 64-bit
• CPU: Intel i3-2100 / AMD A8-5600K
• GPU: Nvidia GeForce GT 630 / Radeon HD 6570
• RAM: 8 GB

And that's it. No, really: check it out for yourself; here's the screenshot we grabbed on October 2nd, as we do expect for devs to update this after the game is out.

We're currently not in the position of building the exact minimum spec rig that is mentioned here. That said, we can set some proper expectations by comparing the minimum mentioned requirements with our own baseline laptop. When that's done, we'll take a look at our benchmarks and see where that leads us. Sounds good, right? If nothing else, at least we'll get a solid sense of what's what with the Ghostrunner Demo performance.

To give you an idea of how the referenced Nvidia GT 630 compares to a laptop-tier Nvidia RTX 2060, here's a simplified graph from the phenomenal UserBenchmark website.

Obviously, the leftmost results are those of RTX 2060. So... yeah. It's effectively almost 1,500 times faster than the GT 630. If you're still wondering where we're going with this, it's that the officially-posted system requirements are almost 100% a total placeholder, because we strongly doubt that GT 630 would run Ghostrunner properly. Or, perhaps, run it at all. To be clear, the GT 630 GPU came out way back in 2012. No one in their right mind should expect it to run much of anything nowadays, really.

The obvious question, then, is how does RTX 2060 perform in the Ghostrunner Demo?

Nvidia RTX 2060 Mobile Ghostrunner Demo Performance

Even though we only had the chance to play the - presumably not perfectly optimized - Ghostrunner Demo, the performance was quite phenomenal. Outside of raytracing options, that is, but we'll get to those a bit later.

Playing the game fully maxed-out with DLSS 2.0 on at 1080p, our i5-9300H / RTX 2060 laptop hovered around 100-120 FPS depending on the specific scene, ensuring a perfectly playable experience if you cap it at around 100 FPS or so. Turning off Nvidia's proprietary super-sampling option drops the framerate a bit, but attaining 60 FPS should never be a problem at this hardware tier. The GPU hovered around 60 degrees Celsius, which means there was no power throttling, either. All in all, we're looking at a rather well-optimized game, even in its pre-release Demo edition.

However, do we think with any seriousness that a GT 630 could run Ghostrunner even at its absolute lowest settings? Not really, no. We're not sure what's up with the default minimum requirements, but we've got a strong suspicion that the game wouldn't even run at those specs.

Ghostrunner Demo RTX Performance

This is where things get tricky. Far as we could tell from our experience with the Ghostrunner Demo performance, raytracing incurs a particularly heavy performance penalty in this implementation. Does it look good? Absolutely! Does it look good enough to warrant dropping to an unstable 40-50 FPS? Not so sure on that front. Whereas DLSS 2.0 helped out a whole lot in the case of, say, Control, this isn't quite the case with the provided Ghostrunner Demo.

At 1080p with raytraced lighting turned on, we don't think Ghostrunner is playable on our hardware baseline. It may be due to the game's fast gameplay, or simply because the framerate varies far too much for us to consider it worth our while. The simple truth is that Ghostrunner looks beautiful with both RTX on and off, and high framerate makes for a far more impressive experience than raytraced reflections, far as we can tell.

This will differ greatly on a player-to-player basis, of course. Chances are that the full release will bring a fresh layer of polish along with it, and that GPU manufacturer drivers will optimize things further. We are, however, currently leaning towards not recommending raytraced Ghostrunner on mid-range hardware such as our i5/RTX 2060 laptop. Here's some hard data on average FPS in the starting Demo area, if you're interested:

Of course, this is just a very general ballpark of what to expect, but we think it gives you a solid idea of what to expect out of your hardware, all in all.

How to play Ghostrunner Demo with RTX on?

We do invite you to verify our data and see what Ghostrunner Demo performance will be like on your own rig! Downloading the Demo itself is easy enough: just find it on Steam, hit 'Install', and you're good to go in no time at all. It's only about 3 gigs bit, so you won't be waiting long, if bandwidth has you worried. And yeah, the game is pretty friggin' fun, so it immediately gets a big recommendation from us.

However, it does seem that some players are having trouble with turning RTX on in Ghostrunner Demo. As it turns out, there's something wonky with the game's WIP launch window. By default, it should offer you the option to choose between the baseline DirectX 11 mode and the enhanced, but unstable-ish DirectX 12 mode. You guessed it: RTX will only work on DirectX 12, and it just so happens that you might not even get the option to choose between the two.

The fix is, thankfully, simple! Right-click on the Ghostrunner Demo listing in your Steam library, and select the 'Properties' button in the drop menu. Then, in the 'General' tab, hit 'Set Launch Options', and add the following line (without quotations): '-dx12'.

In our case, this opened up the DirectX selection menu after launching Ghostrunner, and we could test its raytracing capabilities immediately afterward. Hope it helps you, too!

Wrap-up

In the end, we feel pretty confident when we say that an RTX 3000 series card is desirable if you want to run Ghostrunner with raytracing at an acceptable framerate. Note that 'acceptable framerate' hovers at about 100 FPS in the case of Ghostrunner, owing to its high speed and the precision that is required for the game to play satisfyingly well. The weakest possible RTX option just doesn't cut it in this case, we feel!

Having said that, if you're okay with running Ghostrunner with RTX off, most moderately decent hardware should perform perfectly fine. Maybe not the minimum requirements mentioned on the game's Steam page, but something mid-range will be more than okay, we're sure. Especially if you don't mind dropping graphics options down a tad!

Be sure to give the Ghostrunner Demo a whirl when you get the chance, and then consider getting the full version of the game right here at 2Game! It's coming out on October 27th, so not that big of a wait, really. Good hunting.