All Mt. Tiburon Testing Labs reports

Mt. Tiburon Testing Labs

So you wanna be a racecar driver?

By Ted Pollak, Senior Analyst, gaming systems

Figure 1. Nick Heidfeld, Team BMW; and Ted Pollak. Team JPR.

Formula One Grand Prix (F1) is the king of racing. It’s not necessarily the most competitive, but indeed it is the king. F1 hosts the fastest “turning” cars known to man. Unlike their open-wheeled Indy brethren, they are not mandated to use the exact same engine (currently Honda), and unlike the perplexingly popular NASCAR vehicles, they can turn sharply at speed … both ways, and do it in the rain.

This is no slight against other race classes. Indy/CART is more competitive with multiple lead changes and, because of the track layout, faster speeds, as is NASCAR. From a raw driving skill perspective, I would argue that rally racing is the king, but dirt is a different story.

Being a motor sports spectator is not really my cup of tea. In life there are passengers and there are drivers; I’m the latter and that’s probably why I’m not a big fan of most spectator sporting events. Nevertheless I’ve gone to motor races twice: NASCAR at Infineon Raceway (formerly Sears Point), and the Formula One Grand Prix at Indianapolis Motor Speedway (also known as the Brickyard).

The Brickyard is best known for the Indy 500, a rolling-start oval race where top speeds can exceed 220 mph, and also for the NASCAR Brickyard 400. The stadium can host a staggering 300,000 spectators. For the F1 race, the track is partially reconfigured, utilizing the infield with multiple turns (a.k.a. chicanes), which slow down the cars and force drivers to be skilled both braking and turning at high and low speeds.

The sound … just hearing the sound from up close is worth going to one race in your life. When the drivers are on the gas the cars emit a scream that many of you have probably heard while watching a race on TV. However, what the microphones cannot capture, and which is seared in my memory, is when the drivers get off the gas and their engines choke and beg for air with an audio shockwave that can only be described as supernatural.

It was an awesome experience but at the end of the day I was still a spectator, buying $5 Cokes, paying $30 for parking, $80 for tickets, etc. I want to race—but I’m not interested in changing my career or risking my life.

 *with 5.1 Speaker System, Thrustmaster Rallye GT Pro Force Feedback Wheel, NaturalPoint Track IR, and rFactor Racing Simulator

Table 1 is of course mostly for fun; owning or sponsoring an F1 team is really not an option for most of us, and while the LRS Formula One School in Las Vegas sounds like a blast, and would probably be worth the cash for a genuine enthusiast, we think driving a simulator gives the best bang for the buck, and allows the driver to compete against other racers. So we set off to find a good “formula” of hardware and software.

Figure 2. Formula One. (Source: rFactorCentral and Anonymous)

Figure 3. Formula One. (Source: rFactorCentral and Anonymous)

Figure 4. Some of the choices of vehicles. (Source: rfactorcentral)

Figure 5. Additional car choices. (Source: rfactorcentral)

The game

Enter “rFactor,” a racing simulation game that truly immerses the player in the illusion of a real-life Formula One race. The feeling of speed is intoxicating, the sounds are spot on, and the graphics are amazing. In fact it’s sometimes difficult to tell what’s real and what’s not; I invite you to determine which of the pictures above are real and which are from the game.

Formula One is just one of the virtually unlimited racing classes and vehicles that can be experienced in “rFactor,” but in my opinion it’s the best.

Right out of the box you can also racecarT, NASCAR, and various European Stock classes, including Rally. Image Space Incorporated (ISI), developer of “rFactor,” has made the game extremely modifiable so that huge communities of fans have developed almost every road racing class imaginable.

As you can see with these wonderful screenshots hosted on rfactorcentral.com, the game is not all about Formula One. (By the way, the Honda on the left in Figure 3 down is a real photograph—all others are screenshots. I’m sure ISI is working on tire groove sheen and heat haze, but hey—pretty amazing as it is!)

As for game play, don’t let the complexities of “rFactor’s” simulation level settings intimidate; ISI has made it quite easy to learn with a myriad of settings and AI assistance options that can almost drive the car for you, letting you get familiar with the best lines of each track.

If you want to be advanced, however, there are few limits. To go into how many parameters can be adjusted and simulated would be futile and I would basically have to paraphrase the 70+ page manual (not needed for beginner settings), so let’s move on to the wheel.

Figure 6. The Thrustmaster Rallye GT. (Source: Thurstmaster)

The wheel (and pedals)

Dating back to the early 90s when the formerly small Oregon company started making simulation peripherals, fans of flight and driving simulation knew of few other names more synonymous with quality than Thrustmaster. You would break a toe if you dropped one of their high-end, steel-constructed, glass-filled fighter pilot sticks on it. A few years ago the company was bought by Guillemot Corporation, based in France, and run by the famous family whose namesake adorns their firm (they started UbiSoft also). Over time the product line has expanded into entry-level categories, yet they have not forgotten the roots and have continually improved their elite class of simulation equipment.

The Thrustmaster Rallye GT Force Feedback Pro is an awesome wheel and it works excellently with “rFactor.” Force feedback is not just a motor working against you anymore, it’s now phenomenally advanced. Just like the feedback from a real car, steering loosens at high speed, bumps and stutters when the suspension does so, and suddenly loosens when tires lose grip in a skid. The wheel has multiple programmable buttons and a hat switch, and is constructed solidly with high-quality rubber, metal, and plastics. Shifting can be done either with paddles or a stick. The pedals are made of aluminum and are also solidly constructed. The wheel comes with gas and brake pedal, but an extra pedal set can be easily added for those who want a manual clutch (as I did and recommend). Thrustmaster has already improved this set-up with a clutch edition model that offers three pedals right out of the box.

Though I have graduated to more advanced settings, using a force feedback wheel together with “rFactor’s” training modes is an incredible experience. The wheel (via the game) will essentially drive the car for you, allowing you to feel how much input is needed to negotiate turning a car at high speed, and it will even “guide” you to the best line for the track. Let go and it looks like a ghost is sitting at your desk as the wheel continues to steer.

There are more extravagant (and expensive) wheels on the market, but keeping a realistic bang-for-the-buck factor in mind, without sacrificing any performance, the Thrustmaster Rallye GT Force Feedback Pro is hard to beat.

Figure 7. NaturalPoint head-tracking unit and setup. (Source: NaturalPoint)

Head tracking

Probably the most amazing device for flight and driving sim fans is NaturalPoint TrackIR, an infrared head-tracking device that allows you to watch bogeys from the cockpit (when they are not in front of you, which is rare) or look into turns in a driving game. This ability changes the whole experience and increases the realism level exponentially. The device that I tested is called the TrackIR 4: Pro, which consists of a small sensor that snugly mounts on an LCD or any other monitor, and a baseball cap reflector clip that the sensor picks up.

Head movements are amplified based on sensitivity settings so that, the way I have it configured, looking to the far right of the monitor will move the virtual head 90 degrees. Head tracking is not limited to left and right and, depending on the game, can support a full 6 degrees of freedom. That’s pitch, roll, yaw, as well as x, y, and z axes of movements. In “rFactor” this allows you to look into turns, lean into turns, sit higher in your seat to see closer road detail, sit back to get a wider field of view, and lean forward to better view of gauges and instruments.

TrackIR is totally awesome—I couldn’t imagine ever playing a simulation game again without it.

The system

Figure 8. The monitor and sound system. (Source: Princeton and Logitech)

Our test computer’s cornerstone is the Asus A8R32 MVP Deluxe mother-board. The board can support 4 gigs of DDR ram but we found that 2 gigs were all that were necessary and chose PC 3200. The CPU is an AMD FX-60 Dual Core running at ~2.6 GHz. The graphics processing is handled by twin ATI X1950 XTXs running in Crossfire mode, and all this power-draining hardware is supported by a CoolMax Crossfire Certified CW-650T power supply.

The performance is nothing short of phenomenal and tallied up 3DMark06 scores pushing 9000 at 1680 x 1050 (our monitor’s maximum resolution). In “rFactor,” the system achieves around 100 frames per second in cockpit mode with all settings on high, 1680 x 1050 resolution, 3X antialiasing, and 16X anisotropic filtering.

Our monitor is a Princeton VL2018W 20.1-inch widescreen LCD, which puts out an amazing picture and 8 millisecond response times for a very affordable price. Sound is supplied by a Logitech Z-5450 Dolby 5.1 theater system which supports DTS, THX, and ProLogic II. As with the monitor, not top of the line, but amazing bang for the buck.

What do we think?

If you want to experience the thrill of speed in the safety of your own home, we have found a great “formula” of components and software to experience it. You will thank us on the last lap when the leader blows his gearbox, and the rough pavement on the inside lane of Toban’s final straightaway dashes the checkered flag hopes of the guy (or girl) in your right rearview as you scream over the line.

Epilog

How serious is car racing on a PC or game console? Kazunori Yamauchi, famed creator of the Gran Turismo racing series for the PlayStation platforms, has been selected to Motor Trend’s annual Top 50 power list. This is the third straight year that he has been selected, and once again, he is the only videogame industry personality to make the list. Furthermore, Yamauchi was placed ahead of such automotive luminaries as Jean Todt (Ferrari CEO) and Takeo Fukui (Honda CEO). The complete list of this year's top 50 Power List rankings can be found in the February 2007 issue of Motor Trend.

or the past three weeks we got to test some really great gear—it’s this aspect of the job that really makes it fun. We played with, er, tested racing games with head-tracking and steering wheel, a super 3D gaming mouse, and a killer 37-inch display.