Some impressions of PCARS with DK2.
In its current state, it is already absolutely phenomenal. When I imagine the look of this sim once it is polished, viewed through CV1, I become giddy with excitement. It is incredible stuff. The wow-factor is enormous. One of the best looking games, in a genre ideally suited to VR - the combination makes it probably the best Rift demo possible. This will sell Rifts and sim hardware like there's no tomorrow. Faces will figuratively melt, clothing literally urinated in.
With that out of the way, there are some current flaws. No doubt about it, Live For Speed is more responsive. I have tried all conceivable options to make PCARS respond as quickly. I am well above 75fps, I have applied all the recommended launch options, and I'm running it frame-limited with Nvidia Inspector and v-sync off, and LFS is still more responsive with v-sync ON. It's not a drastic difference, but significant enough to notice. The responsiveness of PCARS is fine, perfectly playable, and if you never saw LFS you might think it doesn't need to be any more responsive. But it makes me nauseous faster than LFS, and I'm convinced it is down to latency.
Whether this is because the LFS renderer is so simplistic compared to PCARS that there is simply less input lag at the same framerate, or because PCARS still has some stuff to work out, I'm not sure, but for now LFS has the advantage. That said, LFS isn't perfect - it's juddery when locked to 75 (head tracking is smooth, but the environment moves past in a consistent, slight judder - Scawen has acknowledged this and says it's a physics problem), whereas PCARS is totally smooth at 75 both in tracking and environment movement.
People have been putting the uncomfortable feeling they get in PCARS down to tracking problems compared to LFS, like the pivot point is wrong and the world movement is weird, but all of this can be resolved with settings. By default there is a bunch of G-force animation and the car reacts to bumps independently from your view, whereas in LFS you are totally fixed to your seat which makes a lot more sense in VR. You can change these values in PCARS to make it just as rigid as LFS. There is also a silly look-to-apex and a weird lean feature and camera shake all on by default, and all that stuff needs to be off. Once all this is off, the tracking seems identical to LFS, yet it's not quite as comfortable due to the slight latency issue.
But these are problems that should get ironed out, either with software updates for DK2 and PCARS, or simply from the more responsive hardware of CV1. Anyone patiently waiting for CV1 can basically ignore what I just said, it'll all be fine!
The short version is this: LFS feels like a being in a car, but in a weird dream where everything looks like an old video game. PCARS feels like being in a
real car. That's it. Once I remove the headset after a PCARS session, it feels like I've had the privilege of actually driving a bunch of supercars and race cars on a bunch of famous tracks. It's the same giddy feeling I got as kid when I was allowed to sit in a really cool car. I could spend ours in the Huayra just looking around at the jewellery. And the rain... my goodness the rain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBG-YJLCEv4
