PC2 Project CARS Pro Announced During LA Auto Show

[Paul Jeffrey]

Slightly Mad Studios have announced the professional grade version of Project CARS 2 at the LA Auto Show....

Working in collaboration with Porsche at the recent LA Auto Show, Slightly Mad Studios have confirmed a new spin off version of their popular Project CARS franchise... introducing Project CARS Pro - a title aimed at the automotive and commercial sectors that makes use of new VR technology to showcase automotive brands, the first of which being Porsche and the new “Porsche 911 VR-Racing Experience”.

“Using Project CARS Pro in the unveiling experience of the new Porsche 911 Carrera S is very special for us,” said Stephen Viljoen, Chief Commercial Officer at Slightly Mad Studios. “We’re developing the professional version of Project CARS for the automotive world to deliver a unique and distinct product with the ability to create unparalleled client experiences, and working with Porsche on this project, utilizing our professional simulation product before its official debut in 2019, is very exciting!”​

On display for the first time at the LA Auto Show, the Project CARS Pro and Porsche collaboration have worked closely with StarVR, a virtual reality headset that utilises "next-generation" technology featuring 210-degree field-of-view and integrated eye tracking, proprietary full RGB AMOLED displays and an impressive 16 million sub-pixels.. which is sounds like a pretty tasty piece of technology and a nice step forward for the already seriously engrossing and developing Virtual Reality technology available at present.

Initially launching with the new Porsche 911 Carrera S car, no firm release date other than "2019" has been mentioned by the development team - so stay tuned for more news as and when it becomes available.

Little is known about the new Project CARS Pro software at present, however it is expected that the sim will be primarily aimed at the automotive industry and not home gaming rigs, although more information will surely be made available by SMS in the near future.

Project CARS 2 is available now on Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC.

Check out the Project CARS 2 sub forum here at RaceDepartment for more news, discussion and features on this sequel release to the hugely popular Project CARS franchise of games.

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[Slowdive]

Glad to see them doing this rather than adding offline custom championships. I hope Porsche gets used to empty promises.

 

[protonv5]

Not sure whats the deal here...Assetto Corsa also did/has a pro version ages ago for some Porsche Centers for their demo sim rigs already. SMS just went the same road as Kunos and made an industry version.
Thats all.

Perhaps in a way, but they never abandoned the previous title or their customers for the sake of selling them a 'real' game. They pretty much delivered on what they said they would. PCars2 was clearly abandoned right after release.

 

[Turk]

I have to say: Software companies are thieves. They rope you in, then kick you to the curb. Hey customer! Buy this! Ok, now buy this! This is the greatest. Well, but now you need this.

At some point the consumer has to take some responsibility for the things they buy. We can't keep blaming the companies when we keep rewarding them with purchases.

I never bought RR so I don't have any hate for it. But this seems like a promotional piece of software, it wouldn't surprise me if you can't even drive the cars, just look at them in VR. The fact they're using prototype commercial VR headsets shows this isn't a consumer product, it's a tech demo sort of thing.

Porsche seem obsessed with doing as much gaming related promotions as they can, they seem to be making up for all that time they wasted in an exclusive contract. It wouldn't surprise me if they instigated this and SMS were in a position to accommodate them.

I don't see anything wrong with this product. It's not really for us from the looks of things. If your anywhere near a Porsche dealership it might be worth a visit to see what next gen VR will look like.

 

[Pixelchaser]

they've run out of marketing opportunity... so now they are going to try fail upwards. it must be the last title in the series... good riddance.

 

[Dirk Steffen]

I just don't think there's a bad enough word in the english language to truly describe my feelings towards the PCars and SMS haters. You lot are truly a sad sad bunch of reprobates. Just enjoy your sims and let others enjoy theirs. FFS.

English is not my first language and I had to look up the word "reprobate".
Here is for others who may want to learn about the word:

Reprobation, in Christian theology, is a corollary to the Calvinistic or broadly Augustinian doctrine of unconditional election which teaches that some of mankind (the elect) are predestined by God for salvation, and the remainder, the reprobate, are left to be condemned to damnation in the "lake of fire". When a sinner is so hardened as to feel no remorse or misgiving of conscience, it is considered as a sign of reprobation.

The English word, reprobate, is from the Latin root probare (English: prove, test), and thus derived from the Latin, reprobatus (reproved, condemned), the opposite of approbatus (commended, approved).

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reprobation

 

[Patrik Marek]

I'd be surprised if they only went for eye candy, perhaps there's more into the simulation value inside pcars2 that many people give it credit for

 

[Patrick van der Meulen]

I think we all tend to read the article towards rFactor Pro. While reality seems to be just a very nice promotional custom build version suitable for other car brands to showcase for their (potential) customers. Nothing wrong with that for a company just trying to add revenues to their income.

 

[Patrik Marek]

rFactor just has aged, it's time to move on

i could be totally wrong but I could only assume that one of the big reason professional teams used it more then they would use say Gran Turismo , is becasue it gives them very similar output of telemetry of what they are getting on real cars, therefore they can learn from it way more , then if the feedback is only based on what the driver said

this is where I think pCARS did a step in good direction to output lot of telemetry data and I can only assume that the Pro version goes quite a bit further with that

 

[ermo]

Well, for one thing, this version wouldn't need to be optimised to run on off-the-shelf consoles with anemic 2-2.5 GHz dual-issue AMD Bobcat/Jaguar CPU cores, which means that the full power of the tyre model could be put to good use along with a DD wheel, high spec pedals and controls, and a 2080 Ti for each eye.

It would make all the sense in the world to run this on e.g. a i9-9900K with a core dedicated to each wheel's Seta Tyre Model simulation running at 1200-2000 Hz, possibly with a slightly higher carcass and contact patch resolution on top.

The 4 remaining cores are more than capable of running the various other subsystems (including graphics, LiveTrack and dynamic weather) and AVX2 optimisations could be turned on unconditionally for "free" performance.

 

[Patrick van der Meulen]

rFactor just has aged, it's time to move on

S397 rFactor 2 is aged. rFPro is far, very, very far from aged.

The strenght of ACPro, PCPro and RaceRoom lies in the PR market for all car and/or race related venues targeted at the “average Joe’s” who aren’t into simracing.

 

[Case_]

(Originally clicked on this article yesterday to read some of the most negative and toxic comments this side of simracing, as more or less expected, but looking at new comments right now, there are obviously people capable of actually discussing stuff without hating on things, so to those: thank you.)

 

[MACH1995]

At some point the consumer has to take some responsibility for the things they buy. We can't keep blaming the companies when we keep rewarding them with purchases.

I never bought RR so I don't have any hate for it. But this seems like a promotional piece of software, it wouldn't surprise me if you can't even drive the cars, just look at them in VR. The fact they're using prototype commercial VR headsets shows this isn't a consumer product, it's a tech demo sort of thing.

Porsche seem obsessed with doing as much gaming related promotions as they can, they seem to be making up for all that time they wasted in an exclusive contract. It wouldn't surprise me if they instigated this and SMS were in a position to accommodate them.

I don't see anything wrong with this product. It's not really for us from the looks of things. If your anywhere near a Porsche dealership it might be worth a visit to see what next gen VR will look like.

The problem was that many people complained of the last patch of Project Cars 2 in the official forums. For example, we wanted a better sound on the 911 RSR, but they gave us practically the same as the first version. Moderators got really triggered and agressive by this. One of them told me that i don´t have the right to complaint. So basically, you couldn´t criticize and see the upgrades of the new patches, because you had to find it.

 

[RMR1]

hating on things

Another Orwellian NewSpeak victim...

 

[mrbungle83]

This. Also there are restrictions to what physics can be run in real time on consumer general-purpose CPU's. CPU development has kind of stagnated, so for this reason alone there may be more that can be done with physics engine on specific purpose professional hardware. rF Pro for example has 1 cm accuracy on their laser-scanned tracks, which I think wouldn't run in real time on any consumer PC.

Stagnated? Were getting huge core counts much higher IPC and higher clocks across all cores. What processors and GPUs are the professionals using that are much better for games... essentially?

 

[bondyboy]

Another Orwellian NewSpeak victim...

The 2 minutes of hate is about to begin...

 

[Patrick van der Meulen]

Stagnated? Were getting huge core counts much higher IPC and higher clocks across all cores. What processors and GPUs are the professionals using that are much better for games... essentially?

Computing units full with accelarators like these: https://www.amd.com/en/products/servers-hpc-accelarators

They can handle simulation computing and analyze data far more efficiently than our day to day cpu and gpu. For example, when you take an eye on your cpu-load, you will see generally idling a lot of cores and threads (in case of a multithreaded cpu). Our personal computers may seem fast, certainly with high end cpu’s and gpu’s. But it ain’t even close to the computing power needed for simulation for the development of racecars.

They have to be able to simulate every little detail as exact as possible. Tyre simulation, asphalt simulation, acurate wind simulation (including flow of every part), temperature simulation, every single part of the virtual car generates data. Only the feed of telemetry alone would be troublesome to be processed by even a high end consumer pc.

And that’s why every race game is just that. What we can play on our machines is very fun, and the simulation is actually pretty good. But way too limited to use it for serious simulations of actual racecars and development of them. But it’s nowhere as precise and exact as RFPro.

In that regard, with the right hardware (pedals and steeringwheel) you can train your racecraft with computer games. But developing cars and learning how to drive an exact virtual replica of a real racecar you have to go to RFPro (or a comparable package if there is any).

Reallife simulation (no matter what is simulated) is really a whole other ball game. And is done with computing power far exceeding that of consumer hardware.

 

[Leonardo Chaves]

I feel like this a crazy hard sector to enter, many teams use rfactor pro or some crazy bespoke software, I feel like this would be a hard area for Project cars pro to enter since migrating across to new software seems like a pain at the scale some of the users are on.

Doesn't seem like they are aiming at professional teams but showrooms.

 

[2stains]

higher IPC

9900k has basically the same IPC as 7700k , the only difference is more cores and slightly higher clocks! Clock for clock same my 7700k at 5.0GHz gets 215 cb.
Could you point me to the much higher IPC CPUs were getting?

 

[John-Eric Saxén]

Stagnated? Were getting huge core counts much higher IPC and higher clocks across all cores. What processors and GPUs are the professionals using that are much better for games... essentially?

Unless you talk about mobile processors, higher IPC has not been the case. Intel hasn't managed to increase IPC at all since Skylake, which was their last major architecture. AMD after doing nothing for five years just caught up close to Skylake IPC numbers, but I doubt there is much more to extract IPC wise.

The increased core counts would indeed be useful if sims made use of them, but even sims like rF2 resort to running physics single threaded. It is apparently hard to make physics multi-threaded and the other problem is that physics have to run on the lowest common denominator. A physics engine can't scale with performance like graphics does, otherwise it would provide a competitive advantage/disadvantage for those that have better CPU's. Basically a commercial sim has to be designed to run with a five year old quad core CPU, otherwise customers are lost.

I wasn't very familiar with what hardware is used on pro sims, interesting facts there from @Patrick van der Meulen.

 

[Isaac Chavira]

I don't get how racing sim developers always promote their game as the 'best and most realistic simulation avaliable' and then manage to make an even better version for big companies. Makes it seem like the developers aren't investing all their time and money into the game which we can play.

I agree with you however none of us own 'Workstations' that can do all the simulation math required in less than a millisecond. Just to run something like that or the Assetto Pro a dual Xeon is most likely required and about 128GB of RAM. Maybe dual 12GB GPU's. Hell I have seen a $25K 24GB GPU already. Sadly what we have is like a 2.0L 4cyl going against an F-16 engine.