***Hopefully this is the right place to post this. If not, let me know. Anyway, my wife will be done with school in a month, and to reward herself for working 60 hour weeks, and going to school, she has informed me that I get to buy her a PS4. "Sure honey, I'll get you a PS4, as long as I can get a racing simulator for said PS4". She approved. So, after that long winded introduction, here is my question: Does anybody here have experience with a racing simulator for PC, XBOX, or PS4? If so, what is your setup? What do you like about it? What don't you like about it? This would be for Dirt Rally, Forza, Assetto Corsa, etc. The wife approves, and I might be able to finally get her interested in cars! She still doesn't fully understand why I have a 4 wheeled girlfriend in the driveway, that gets a lot of my time and attention. Just to clarify, I'm not talking about a $20K full racing sim with motion. Although that would really be rad, I'm basically just referring to a driving chair with pedals, wheel, shifter, hand brake, etc. I've done a little bit of research online, and I like the idea of a VR setup, but I'm not totally stuck on going that route. I'm not a gamer per se, although in high school I could throw down on Super Mario Kart! Any help/advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
*sigh* welcome to the rabbit hole, enjoy your decent. @SurlyOldManMN is it you or I that will offer to let him try our stuff first? lol
ynotboth?.jpg We need to have a head-2-head meat meet and get two setups in the same place. Possibly three if we can hoodwink Readymix/Aegis...
I could host this. I suppose I could provide some info as well. I have a GT Omega Pro with the RS9 seat, T300 base with Thrustmaster's pedals thanks to Surly. I also currently have his shifter. I have a set of Fanatec CSL Elite pedals, however, the cum dumpster I bought my rig from packaged it all like a blind homeless person, so the plugs were damaged in transit (among other things being damaged). I also have both the Oculus Rift and Lenovo Explorer currently for VR headsets. Really depends on what you already have (hardware wise) and what you're looking to get out of it and what you're looking to spend.
If you're looking for budget buys, Logitech's G29 (Playstation) and G920 (Xbox) are both on sale still for $200.
@SimRacer if you want a pro setup http://www.wagnerraceproducts.com/ (more affordable than you might think, btw)
If you're looking to get into it I would recommend getting a PC set up if you want to get really into it. I have a Vive VR and it helps loads according to people who aren't used to the visual of static head position. The VR isn't necessary though. If you are looking for more casual, you will be fine on a console. iRacing is for the most serious, Assetto Corsa is a good second place, with IMO Project Cars coming in a close third. This is really the most important question. Start broad and then narrow down your options from there.
Was initially planning on playing on PS4, and getting used to it, then possibly moving towards a decent entry level gaming PC. After looking at different rig options, I like the RSeat RS1, with either Thrustmaster, or Fanatec bits. I've got a 55" LG tv in the man cave, so I'd like to utilize that, and if I decide to go full PC mode, I can venture down that rabbit hole. I'm still milking a desktop PC for my interwebs, but she's on her last legs, so moving over a new PC is probably in the not too distant future. If I just stay with the console route, without VR (for the time being), I was kinda budgeting $2000-$2500. Obviously, the cheaper the better, but you get what you pay for, and I don't want to drop a bunch of $ on a "starter package", only to decide I'd like something better, and have to drop even more $. 40 yrs old is right around the corner for me, so in a sense, this is my mid life crisis rig.
For that budget you could easily get a GT Omega Pro or Obutto Ozone, wheel and pedal combo and depending on how crazy you got with those two pieces you could still build a tower as well or get into VR and a cheaper set up.
I would, personally, advise against dumping a ton of money into unless you already know you're hooked. I planned on racing numerous nights a week, but it simply hasn't played out like that. GT Omega Pro RS6- $430, free shipping. https://usa.gtomegaracing.com/racin.../gt-omega-pro-racing-simulator-basic-rs6-seat Thrustmaster T300 w/ T3PA pedals and FXX wheel (same set up I have) for $470 https://www.amazon.com/Thrustmaster...=1532021258&sr=8-6&keywords=thrustmaster+t300 That's $900 in, and you've got your main components. that leaves you $1100-1600 for VR and a VR capable desktop... which is really easy to do currently now that GPU prices are back down.
I'm assuming the budget would *not* include a PC or monitors if you're going that route in the future... Since you're looking at console for sure and only possibly PC, brand ecosystem is going to be a concern. If it were PC-only you could mix and match components without much concern and it would open up the ability to go with an OSW setup, which is the gold standard outside of $texas setups like Leo Bodnar gear. PS4 allows some peripheral mixing but you'll have to look into exactly what's possible. With Xbox you're either 100% fanatec, 100% thrustmaster or 100% logitech. There is no inbetween because everything has to be plugged in via the wheelbase. Given it's a mid life crisis rig, I would skip thrustmaster or logitech and go the fanatec route. It is generally considered the best you can get before you get into direct drive wheels (note they just released a direct drive but it will wreck your budget and is several months out from being available). Thrustmaster is between the Logitech and Fanatec offerings, much closer to the former than the latter. Thrustmaster has a more complete ecosystem for peripherals and generally offers higher end stuff if you want to get stupid compared to Logitech. Fanatec buries them both for customizations and peripherals. As far as rigs, 8020 based stuff is all the rage now. A few companies offer ready to go kits. Sim Lab is pretty common. You can always mock up your own. Rseat RS1 is a nice looking rig but I think it's overpriced for the utility. If you really like the styling than knock yourself out. FWIW I'll likely be going to 8020 from my Next level Racing stand. If you're willing to go used, $2500 can get you into a decent turnkey setup. There is an iRacing Fleamarket facebook group that consistenly has a ton of good stuff, or isrtv (ask curly about it!) often has quite a bit. The other option is to scale back on the hardware costs and go with TM TX/T300 stuff and go PC. If you pick them up used you'd be able to recoupe the cost when/if you're ready to jump up. One way or the other I would angle for VR. I haven't tried PSVR so can't comment, but VR has absolutely ruined trying to play racing games on flat monitors for me. There just isn't any going back, despite the drawbacks around resolution and FOV.
... or you can wait till september, buy my whole setup, add the seat portion, and I can get my 8020 + DD on.
I think I'm right around $2500 or so total for the complete rig, powerspec 1710 laptop and vr headsets. at least I hope that's all I've spent.
Recommend lowballing the **** out of Curly for his rift on merit that he wouldn't have to deal with remote buyers and shipping.
I was going to be posting it up for sale and was going to offer it to Surly first, but yeah, I'll likely be selling the Rift soonish, since the WMR seems to have a crisper picture and haven't had issues tearing (yet).
IF I remember, I'll see if the rig will fit in the Foz broken in half, but don't bet on me remembering.
After looking at the GT Omega Pro RS6, I'm sold. Now I just need to do some more research on the VR aspect of things. Can somebody recommend a decent entry level gaming PC, that can double as my interweb machine?
Depends on what you want to spend, really. Laptop or desktop, anything with a RX570 or 1060 3gb I believe are verified for WMR, Vive, and Rift. Quite honestly, you should just come check out my set up, since it'll likely be close to the direction you go. lol
That's really pushing it for VR simracing, but doable. Note the more common sims tend to put a strain on single-core cpu performance too. Iracing in particular tends to be cpu-constrained.
I didn't say they'd be ideal, just verified compatible. I've been pretty surprised that I haven't had issues with my 1070, honestly, but it gets hot as hell if it isn't on that cooling pad too.
I can send you the list of my build if you wish. I just built it last December, came out right around $1300. You could probably knock it down a bit. Although the monitor and a couple other things were borrowed from work.
I have a few PCs that can serve VR duty, but lately, the Razer Blade has served us well with the Razer Core + 1080TI FTW3. I have a Vive VR setup. I also have an older GranTuriso5 branded Logitech GT wheel and pedals, but I have yet to connect all of this into one gaming session, so a sim-racing event and 'bring your own rig' type setting would be ideal to try some things out. I also own Assetto Corsa like the rest of these turds, so I guess I'm prepared. Playstation has a PSVR setup, but I don't know the specifics on what games go with it. However, odds are, if you want to actually play sim-racing VR games with actual people, and don't want to be locked into any specific ecosystem where you are at the whim of the hardware lifecycle of the manufacturer, you really should stick to PC for this sort of thing. Racing games seem to have a bit more horsepower requirements than your standard VR games, so if you can get yourself into a GTX1070 gpu, you're likely going to be fine. A 1060 will also work, but I think you're skirting minimum specs, which in the VR world, seems to be a "if everything is working 100%, it'll be fine, but if anything isn't 100%, you'll get stuttering" sort of affair, at least in my experience. Best bet for a good 'budget' sim racing setup right now, with VR as an option: Core i5 or Ryzen 5 CPU 16GB DDR4 (you can do 8, but I think games are starting to press that boundry a bit, plus, seriously, things just run better the more working space you have) GTX-1070 or better. I can't comment on the Radeon/Vega equivalent, because they haven't made a competitive card in a long time. I know the RX480 was minimum spec in 2016 when the Vive and Rift were hitting the scene, so, I'd say stay in the equivalent or better realm of that (RX580?) I prefer the Vive, but the Rift is dirty cheap, if you don't care at all about your identity security or privacy (their app chats a lot with the Facebook mothership). I haven't messed around with any of the tier 2 stuff, but Curly seems to like his Lenovo unit, so there's always that. Any force feedback wheel made in the last 5 years will likely be fine. Logitech stuff is usually decent, and wont break the bank. Like I said earlier, my GT wheel was made for GranTurismo 5 for the PS3, it works just fine on the PC, and I can use every single button and control on it, and map them however I wish. I do recommend some sort of mount with a car seat for all this. I built one out of PVC years ago, and even though it was flimsy as ****, and looked like a pile of trash, it worked better than sitting at my desk with pedals on the hardwood floor (they shift all over the place). Nowadays, they sell cheap kits on eBay that include the base + one of the hundreds of ****ty chinese knockoff automotive racing seats that nobody should ever buy for use in an actual car but are perfect for this. You could probably spend 200 and get one shipped to your doorstep.
I'd say you should determine if you want a tower or laptop too, as that'll be a big different in cost and set up too. Either is an option, but something to keep in mind if you want to have the PC option.
Buy a G29 and see how much you use it on your PS4, if it's collecting dust after a few months you'll have saved yourself thousands.
Ehhh... console racing is a whole different thing than PC though. I didn't really give a **** until I tried PC stuff on a whim after decades of casual console racing.
On the other hand, I went and tried a couple of my buddies high end rigs, thought they were great, invested in similar hardware and then found out that I don't actually use it that much. He can always take that G29 to the PC with a single monitor setup for next to nothing, there are certainly more people online running a setup like that than VR and Direct Drive. It somewhat depends what you want to get out of it, casual gaming, competition, driver training; in any case "try before you buy (the expensive stuff)"
That's fair. Just want to highlight that casual racing on PS4 isn't necessarily going to give you an indication of whether you'd enjoy something like iRacing, as an example (and vice versa).
If you can use DVI, there really is a negligible difference. (I say that because very high bandwidth applications cannot be done with DVI; think 4k) DVI is pretty much HDMI without the audio channel.
Yeah, I've seen people suggest DVI for gaming, but I've also seen people suggest DisplayPort. I just want to run 3 27" 144HZ monitors, and looking for the best picture possible.
DisplayPort is fine and you'll have a lot more options for triple vs trying to find a card with 3x dvi.
Good to know. I purchased a 24" monitor last week, just to see if it was going to be big enough for me. I've currently got it setup on the suggested "gaming settings" via DVI, but I do notice that the clarity is different with certain websites. Of course, the monitor didn't come with a DisplayPort cable. Maybe none of them do. I found a great deal on 3 27", so I think this 24" will get returned to Best Buy. I guess I should plan on getting some DisplayPort cables. All of this hardware stuff is a lot to take in, but I do enjoy learning about all of this. Especially since the last time I did anything with gaming, I had a PS1. Since I got my gaming PC, its amazing what i've been missing. I don't know how I got by on little crappy Dell desktops for the past 15 years.
Fanatec v2.5 Hub w/P1 Wheel Thrustmaster T3PA Pro Pedals Thrustmaster TH8A Shifter Full Gaming PC 3 24" Asus 1920 x 1080 144hz monitors Rig came with no instructions, so I had to piece it together via pictures from the for sale thread. Took the better part of all weekend to get it sorted, and dialed in just right. 8020 is great, and very versatile, but all of the little fasteners can be a big pain in the ass. The hardware that 8020 sent for their monitor mounts weren't beefy enough for me, so I can't mount those yet. Then, I found out that Thrustmaster pedals require an adapter, in order to be used in conjunction with a Fanatec hub. So I had to order that last night. So, when it was all said and done last night, I ended up with a really cool computer desk that has a racing seat!
ah yes, the adapter situation. I have Fanatec pedals that you'd need an RJ12 cable for that I'd sell cheap, but the plugs got kinda messed up for the pedals themselves in shipping so they'd need to be taped or held in place (retention clips on the plugs are MIA). that way you wouldn't have to wait on the adapter and would just need the RJ12 cable since it'd plug directly into the Fanatec base.
