Yesterday I tried for the first time to wake around the Porsche 911 GT3 Cup (992 in VR…. It’s so delusional to see missing parts on the car.. rear bumper, tires…… it’s an official car and I was really disappointed with this experience.
It's allways been like that, that the car isn't fully rendered in cockpit view. Another option would be to have terrible framefrates or to be limited to tiny grid sizes. Why aren't you using the external cams to take a look at your car? While racing you don't need to see the rear bumper of your car. And the rear tires only make sense for your openwheel racing.
Is that the fault of the user for not having the most advanced system? Or fault of the Devs for not coding optimal performance optimisations for VR? Regardless of whether things should be in view or not, the fact remains VR performance as standard in this Sim is poor. It'll be interesting to see if they've made any advancements in this area with LMU.
This has nothing to do with VR. It's like that for all users. And it's a concious design that actually makes sense. Why would you render parts that aren't visible while being in cockpit view? That would be poor performance optimization. To take a look at the car you need to use external or freecam, wich is a perfectly fine solution. And this isn't something that is a question of poor design desicions but following standards in the gaming industry. Do we wanna make a guess how many games render just visible character parts in first person? In contrast there is a reason why competing sim racing titles have very limited grid sizes. The reason is because they were developed with VR in mind right from the start and to get around perfomance issues due to rendering alot of useless stuff in first person they had to set a limit wich is a much worse way of optimizing a game.
The bold part is incorrect as they were hiding body parts on cars long before VR became a thing Personally I'd rather see a complete car no matter the view, understandably performance needs to be gained from somewhere but I wish they'd move on from "hiding" body parts that might not actually cause that much of a drop these days, seeing as ISI (as I referred too) started doing this 10+years ago. Anyway, I was generally referring to VR needing blatantly more optimisation work regardless of whether a bumper is on view or not.
I think you misread my comment. You are correct that the missing bodyparts are actually going back to rF1. For GTR2 you had to enable the wheels being visible for open wheel mods because they weren't rendered for the tin tops as GTR2 was pretty heavy on the hardware for it's time, same as rF2 later on. For AC and the Madness engine games VR was planned right from the beginning so they had to balance the performance hit somehow, especialy as console ports for those racing sims were planned and consoles weren't strong enough to support high end sims like rF2 or AC with 100 cars. So what's the easiest way to solve the issue? 32 player grids, especialy if you are that insane like Kunos to give AI cars player physics and if you plan to add fancy things like photo modes. All this needs not just to work on the client side but has to be networkable. I don't know how familiar you are with the Madness engine sims but online play, netcode and collision detection is a nightmare in those games far away from what we are used to in rF2 or iRacing. And here comes the problem that in MP scenarios at race start not just you want to take a look at the backseat but the guys around you aswell, while this isn't really solvable with heavy LODing as cars are very close to each other. The thing with optimization is tricky and I would go as far as saying that there isn't such thing as VR specific improvements when it comes to performance, especialy when your proposal is adding even more load as cars aren't build of a "few" polygons like ten years ago but millions, with 4k textures and many more different complex materials and shaders. The problems are the same as ten years ago and it's sometimes wierd to read comments like yours where people claim that we shouldn't have these issues in 2023. That would be true if cars and tracks had the same quality like ten years ago but that's obviously not the case. Hardware isn't that far ahead that you can play current racing sims maxed out at these high resolutions with grid sizes of 60 cars and more and expect to keep 90 or even more FPS constantly. For FPS games that might be an option but for racing sims where you need every FPS and smooth gameplay that's not an option. On one hand people complain that they can't see the calipers on their rear brakes in VR and on the other hand they complain that it starts to stutter when they go into the night with rain and huge grid sizes like in Le Mans. And going forward, with LMU wich will once again have better visuals, higher quality cars across the board and over 60 car grids garantued I don't see this changing. Performance optimization is and allways will be a balancing act between quality and performance. Obviously you can allways gain a bit here and there, but it's not like they can switch a magic button increase the visual quality while decreasing the frame time heavily. That's not gonna work. And while we are discussing, the solution to the problem mentioned in the OP as allready been given: simply use the external cams and not the cockpit view.
Someone want to mod a detailed third party .gen file so the whole car is visible, and see what performance impact there is?
Would be interesting for sure. For a single car on track you won't notice much difference but with the highly detailed cars like the 488, the 992 Cup or the Class 1 and a full field there should be a noticable difference. And if my memory isn't too bad I remember people quite often complaining about performance when S397 stepped up their game for cars and tracks step by step.
Modifying the gen for cockpit view will only affect the player car. Field size won't make a difference. Anyway, it's all speculation without testing.
I remember buying my first VR set and using it with Project Cars 2 - I was interested on immersion and stopped my Zakspeed Capri right after the tunnel in Monaco, "jumping" out of the car (my rig) and looked around. It was an interesting and exciting experience - I did one time exactly ... I am very pleased if I look (with cockpit view in VR) to right bottom and see a fire distinguisher, bottom plate, cables, things like that and from time to time I lean out the side window, looking to front and back - but I always do it when I am in the box or at starting grid for short moment. So - my 2 cents: a) every user (driver) has different habits and therefore different expectations b) doing like me levels the performance aspect (or is there anybody jumping out off the car while racing at 150 mph?) I agree - VR performance in rF2 could be better, but I think it was worse 12 to 18 months ago (I am using a Pico 4 now and had a Rift S and I remember last year I was not really able to use the Rift S with high details, now I am), but simulations like PC1 and PC2 were optimized for using VR headsets right from the beginning of development (IMHO) and that makes a big difference. If I remember correctly there was native VR support in rF2 but they dropped it at some point ... for whatever reason ... and all applications using Steam VR are lacking VR performance IMHO. As a developer you will need to concentrate on one aspect I think and VR and screen view are different things.
I dont care if the missing parts “ are missing “ when I drive but when I park the car and I want to simply wake around the car I want to see the car complete.
Single screen - Triple screen - VR. Those are the most common used display options in Simracing these days, where VR scores much higher than you might think at first. although I not really have problems with switching to another cam to view a car in full glory.. I do have a problem with most popular cars in this sim just having a unfinished and messy interior, outdated driver and helmet models, driver model placement and rigging faults. Invisible on screens but clearly visible in VR. Bit of a shame actually..
