GT5 Rain effect is very poor :(

Tony Winslade · Jan 23, 2011

I've had the game since launch and overall I'm very pleased with most of it but the rain effect from the inside cockpit view is abysmal. It's nothing short of square white chunky pixels the size of my thumb nail that hits the windscreen and the wipers have no effect at all.

Plus you cant see anything in front if you, yes I know a few of you might say that's how it is in racing as the other cars kick up so much spray that its impossible to see a head in real racing but its the same when you have a clear road a head. Now I do a lot of driving in real life and I can confirm even when its raining hard with my wipers on I can see pretty well a head.

I've seen PS2 games with better rain effects than this game so all those promo vids and tv adverts showing these amazing rain effects and quoting in small print at the bottom of the tv screen "actual ingame footage" are misleading and ....well, false advertising

Why after 5yrs plus in production do I get the sense that this game was rushed out, I know Kazunori Yamauchi has been quoted as saying he feels the game is unfinished in his eyes and future patches will remedy this but PD could have at least got the main components of the game perfect. They only had to look at other driving games to see that GT5 needed to have a big improvement when it came to the rain effect.

I'm not sure future patches will be dealing with graphical issues so I'm guessing that we are stuck with chunky square white pixels sliding up our windscreens

UMC 22 · Jan 23, 2011

I'm not going to say that GT5 has amazing rain affects and I've definitely seen better, but I don't think they're nearly as bad as you're making them out to be. I don't know what type of display you're using, but I have yet to see square rain on my monitor. As for your memories of PS2 games, I'd say that they're maybe a tad rose coloured. You always remember games as looking and playing better than they actually did, because at the time they were the pinnacle and you had nothing better to compare it with.

To be honest, I think its time to start giving console games a bit of a break when it comes to graphics. I mean, they're not PCs. They don't have anything like the same power for all the latest and greatest graphical effects. Also, with GT5 being a racing simulator, the top priority when it comes to visuals simply has to be maintaining a good framerate. Every single thing that appears on the screen uses resources, so you have to draw the line somewhere. If you start adding perfect rain splatters with real-time visual distortion, proper non-flat trees with individual branches and leaves, perfectly smooth shadows with no pixelation, etc etc etc, GT5 on a PS3 would quickly be reduced to a crawl.

Personally, I would rather have fast, smooth racing involving 16 premium modelled cars and slightly compromised graphics than slow, choppy racing involving 5 standard modelled cars and photo-realistic graphics.