rFactor 2 Update Brings Significant Improvements to Loading Times

rFactor 2 Load Times Update 00.jpg
Studio 397 released an update last week for rFactor 2 that addressed a long-standing issue for the sim: loading times.

Build 1.1126 of rFactor 2 became available on Steam last week, and though the update was small and didn't garner very many headlines, the impressive changes to the loading times are worth discussing.

In recent years two of the more common shortcomings players complained about in rFactor 2 were the dated graphics and the slow load times. The former was a focus for improvement for the Studio 397 team through 2020, and the latter has now been addressed in the most recent build.

In testing, my own load times on my AMD 3900X and 6800 XT based system were reduced by roughly half versus the outgoing build. Loading a new AI race session at the Nurburgring Nordschleife used to cost me close to five minutes, but that time is now under two minutes for me. Loading a single car practice session at Lime Rock Park went from close to two minutes to under one minute. This still lands rFactor 2 at the higher end of loading times for racing sims, but it's now far closer to its competitors. These values will be different for each player, but if you're like me and held back on playing the title because of the long wait times, give this latest update a try.

rFactor 2 Load Times Update 02.jpg


Here is an excerpt from the 1.1126 changelog regarding load times:

Game Loading
  • Optimizations to Game Loading and Series switching.
  • Optimizations to Texture Loading.
  • Added the ability to load cached track files from the component to improve loading times.
  • Improved shader loading and added pre-built shader cache to improve loading times.

So well done to Studio 397 on these changes. Testing the improved load times allowed me to reconnect with a sim I love. The improved load times allowed me to enter the sessions in a more positive mindset, and reminded me of the pure joy I get from racing in rFactor 2.

Let us know your thoughts on the improvements to rF2 in the comments below.
  • Like
  • Haha
  • Love
Reactions: AndrewUK1990, avenger82, Jarda1111 and 34 others
About author
Mike Smith
Mike Smith
I have been obsessed with sim racing and racing games since the 1980's. My first taste of live auto racing was in 1988, and I couldn't get enough ever since. Lead writer for RaceDepartment, and owner of SimRacing604 and its YouTube channel. Favourite sims include Assetto Corsa Competizione, Assetto Corsa, rFactor 2, Automobilista 2, DiRT Rally 2 - On Twitter as @simracing604

More in rFactor 2

Comments

Luciano Santos Filho
Cheesenium said:
How about the disaster out AI? Are they planning to fix that?
Click to expand...

Boby Kim said:
rF2, once the sim with the best AI. Sad to see Studio666 has ruined the AI completely.
Click to expand...
I am curious, what happened to the AI?

I mean, last time I tried RF2 the AI was one of the things this sim could still do reasonably well, although it was not perfect. Notably, there were the slipstream issue and the odd behavior in the in lap, in which the AI would not try to pass slower cars, even from slower classes.

But you guys seem to be talking about something new. What would it be?
 
Last edited:
Bert Austen
Premium
Give it a try ....loading the game if you haven't played it for a long time @ drama unpacking of 50 packs :O_o: waiting and waiting .....to long , and poor ai and grafic bin finish with it , ac/acc/ams2 and race room enough for me , go arrange the funeral now:cry:
 
Botmeister
The unpacking of packs is horrible! But it's only the first time you start the game. And with added content of course.

As annoying as it is, I can't see why people use that as an argument for bad loading times.
 
Last edited:
D
Jach said:
Hopefully there will be something like rf 2 content manager so it takes 2 second to start the game :rolleyes:
Click to expand...
I would guess, no. The track unpacks cached files(which are now included in official tracks) and also the cars have to be unpacked. Usually anything after 85-88% of the loading process falls to the cars. The more different car models, the slower the loading process. But it still is markedly faster than before. 3rd party tracks will require some tweaking to get the same performance games, notablly locating the Cbash and shader cache files inside the track mas file as opposed to the old method which kept them in a separate folder.
Zandvoort 2020 should provide the clearest example of the new loading times.
 
T_rac3
When I seat down to enjoy some driving, (sadly in weekends only in the last months) I'm preparing to drive around 2-3 hours. I don't plan to start/stop/start/stop rFactor2 or any other sim. I start it and drive it.
In all my honesty, I only start any of them once. So, 3-4 even 5 minutes (for rF2) it is not so much an issue, at least for me.
It is worth the waiting time for the experience it brings. And this is only when you start the sim once in few months and every time with a new track. Someone who use it on a daily (more or less) basis have a slightly different, and friendly experience.
Of course, if you start the rF2 only when it is an update, the experience isn't very pleasant. But this is not a valid reason to remove it from your hard drive. If you don't like the feel of the cars or the FFB , yes, DELETE it, but not for loading time. rF2 didn't deserve that ;)
 
Last edited:
Mekonrider
I'll give it another go but long loading times do put you off, especially if you've got a rig to get in and out of and a VR headset on. AMS2 and Raceroom load really quickly but I hate sitting around for literally minutes for a track to load once I've got sat down and headset on.
 
Graham Botha
TurboT said:
The Reverb G2 still doesn't work(with the Nvidia 3080TI) :( Major GPU fps drops even on the lowest settings. Waiting again for the next update....
Click to expand...
Load times are better, unfortunately but still not great.

I know its a bit off topic, sorry. I've read on the forums that some RXT30 series owners have issues with RF2 VR. I run a Reverb OG on a RTX2080Ti with most settings on medium and some on low with steam vr native res 2160x2160. I get 90FPS for the most part. Still, every now and then I do get frame drops and stutters. I don't run motion smoothing, as I found that makes the stutters worse (don't even get me started on how bad motion smoothing artifacts are with RF2). What I tested yesterday though was setting the framerate limiter in the player.json file to 45fps and forcing motion smoothing, limiting via NVidia control panel does not seem to have an effect. The result was not ideal but at least it was smooth. Running Lemans in the rain with 10 visible cars ran well, but sometimes the frame times went above 22ms. That being said it was still smooth visually, dropping very few frames. Something to perhaps try out?

That being said, from my experience RF2 is an unoptimized mess, I wish they would consider an Open XR implementation. That could possibly make things a bit better but I am not holding my breath.
 
Last edited:
C
Luciano Santos Filho said:
I am curious, what happened to the AI?

I mean, last time I tried RF2 the AI was one of the things this sim could still do reasonably well, although it was not perfect. Notably, there were the slipstream issue and the odd behavior in the in lap, in which the AI would not try to pass slower cars, even from slower classes.

But you guys seem to be talking about something new. What would it be?
Click to expand...

my issue with the ai is generally AI behavior. They tend to spun out too often which lead to very frequent full course yellow. at the end, all you get is safety car for a few laps. Then race a lap or so and got into another round of full course yellow with safety car. It is unplayable with safety cars turned on.

even without safety car, you’ll see some cars spinning out almost every lap because they messed up the ai logic and ignored the bugs.

I used to love racing in this game due to the AI. Now, the whole game is uninstalled because it’s no fun at all. The content are insanely expensive for the quality. With the state of the game, I ain’t giving them a cent.
 
Last edited:
T
a friend of mine bought during the sale on steam now the gt3 pack and some tracks and we tried them out at my place on the csl dd, but even after lots of tweaking around i have to say i was not at all impressed, like, sure it was "good", but nothing spectacular as some people make the physics and ffb out to be.
i still am feeling more detail and understand the gt3 cars in ACC better.
now it might also just come down to personal preferences and for sure i am way more used to how ACC feels and drives, but yeah, i don't know, it did not really click with me during my 2-3 hours with it.
so for me its like 1) it does not look good like at all compared to the industry leaders, 2) does not sound as good as others, 3) does not drive as good and 4) is for all that even way more expensive per content piece than others, the only other sim more expensive per content piece is iracing - and while iracing is still too expensive for my taste, it at least offers some quite unique features and is a highly polished product and offers a curated environment.
 
Last edited:
V
Premium
Cheesenium said:
my issue with the ai is generally AI behavior. They tend to spun out too often which lead to very frequent full course yellow. at the end, all you get is safety car for a few laps. Then race a lap or so and got into another round of full course yellow with safety car. It is unplayable with safety cars turned on.

even without safety car, you’ll see some cars spinning out almost every lap because they messed up the ai logic and ignored the bugs.

I used to love racing in this game due to the AI. Now, the whole game is uninstalled because it’s no fun at all. The content are insanely expensive for the quality. With the state of the game, I ain’t giving them a cent.
Click to expand...
You have to race with black flags only. And if you tweak the AI on the player.json file as advised on the S397 Forum (look for a thread called AIW), run practice sessions, and the AI will improve their behaviour.
Depending on the cars and tracks, you can have very good AI races with very believable behaviour (including how they crash fighting for position).
And with black flags only, when they do crash, racing continues. It's that simple.
 
V
Premium
Graham Botha said:
Load times are better, unfortunately but still not great.

I know its a bit off topic, sorry. I've read on the forums that some RXT30 series owners have issues with RF2 VR. I run a Reverb OG on a RTX2080Ti with most settings on medium and some on low with steam vr native res 2160x2160. I get 90FPS for the most part. Still, every now and then I do get frame drops and stutters. I don't run motion smoothing, as I found that makes the stutters worse (don't even get me started on how bad motion smoothing artifacts are with RF2). What I tested yesterday though was setting the framerate limiter in the player.json file to 45fps and forcing motion smoothing, limiting via NVidia control panel does not seem to have an effect. The result was not ideal but at least it was smooth. Running Lemans in the rain with 10 visible cars ran well, but sometimes the frame times went above 22ms. That being said it was still smooth visually, dropping very few frames. Something to perhaps try out?

That being said, from my experience RF2 is an unoptimized mess, I wish they would consider an Open XR implementation. That could possibly make things a bit better but I am not holding my breath.
Click to expand...
rF2's FFB + VR is a quasi religious experience in my opinion.
However, there are situations where the frame times drop and it gets stuttery, precisely sun rise and sun set + rainy conditions.
This is, however, happening on other sims too under those conditions when the amount of calculations needed to render 2 frames each frame time can go beyond the level of what is your set up.
And that includes having a 3090. There are situations when it's simply too much for today's hardware.
 
Gevatter
Premium
v4v474 said:
You have to race with black flags only. And if you tweak the AI on the player.json file as advised on the S397 Forum (look for a thread called AIW), run practice sessions, and the AI will improve their behaviour.
Depending on the cars and tracks, you can have very good AI races with very believable behaviour (including how they crash fighting for position).
And with black flags only, when they do crash, racing continues. It's that simple.
Click to expand...
But that's part or the problem imo. It works, but you have to jump through those hoops first. Go into the files and change stuff you have to look up on the forums. Turn off flags. I get that an rF2 enthusiast has no issue with that, but the average user doesn't want to do that, and frankly you shouldn't have to do that to have an experience you could have in rF2 out of the box 4 years ago.

inb4 "I did a 10 lap race in the dry today and it worked perfectly": Absolutely. Now do a 2 hour multiclass race in changing weather conditions with flag rules enabled and see how well it goes. rF2 offers all those options to make races interesting but you can basically use none with the AI currently.
 
Last edited:
V
Premium
th3orist said:
a friend of mine bought during the sale on steam now the gt3 pack and some tracks and we tried them out at my place on the csl dd, but even after lots of tweaking around i have to say i was not at all impressed, like, sure it was "good", but nothing spectacular as some people make the physics and ffb out to be.
i still am feeling more detail and understand the gt3 cars in ACC better.
now it might also just come down to personal preferences and for sure i am way more used to how ACC feels and drives, but yeah, i don't know, it did not really click with me during my 2-3 hours with it.
so for me its like 1) it does not look good like at all compared to the industry leaders, 2) does not sound as good as others, 3) does not drive as good and 4) is for all that even way more expensive per content piece than others, the only other sim more expensive per content piece is iracing - and while iracing is still too expensive for my taste, it at least offers some quite unique features and is a highly polished product and offers a curated environment.
Click to expand...
€13,00 for a full pack of GT3 cars is not expensive.
Similar price will get you a bunch of endurance cars.
Similar price will get you the DLC tracks.
Adding up everything reaches a significant value, but along with DLC you have dozens of high quality mods (tracks and cars), some of them DLC level.
Now, you not liking how cars feel, the FFB, is highly surprising because there is no sim that gives you a better "seat in the pants" feel, in my opinion
Bert Austen said:
Give it a try ....loading the game if you haven't played it for a long time @ drama unpacking of 50 packs :O_o: waiting and waiting .....to long , and poor ai and grafic bin finish with it , ac/acc/ams2 and race room enough for me , go arrange the funeral now:cry:
Click to expand...
straight from the game:
911 Imola.jpg

. But hey, everyone has their own tastes.
 
V
Premium
Gevatter said:
But that's part or the problem imo. It works, but you have to jump through those hoops first. Go into the files and change stuff you have to look up on the forums. Turn off flags. I get that an rF2 enthusiast has no issue with that, but the average user doesn't want to do that, and frankly you shouldn't have to do that to have an experience you could have in rF2 out of the box 4 years ago.

inb4 "I did a 10 lap race in the dry today and it worked perfectly": Absolutely. Now do a 2 hour multiclass race in changing weather conditions with flag rules enabled and see how well it goes. rF2 offers all those options to make races interesting but you can basically use none with the AI currently.
Click to expand...
No game manages to handle AI multi class racing. RF2 fails on that, no doubt when pit stops are needed.
 
wein
Premium
The load has not reached a minute in my case, and I have hdd disk ... Important advance ...
 

Latest News

Article information

Author
Mike Smith
Article read time
2 min read
Views
19,461
Comments
130
Last update

Share this article

Are you buying car setups?

  • Yes

  • No

Results are only viewable after voting.
See comments…
Back
Top