I must amend a previous comment i made that i would not consider upgrading to the accuforce wheel anymore because i'm so content with the t500. Whilst i'm still very happy with the upgrade over my CSR-Elite wheel, i would like to get an accuforce wheel because thinking about it now the t500 is great but there is still room for improvement. A smooth, linear and much stronger ffb like the accuforce (if it's truly as powerful as the bodnar but much cheaper) is the pinnacle of sim racing wheels you could possibly want.
Yes plus the software/firmware that is supposed to come with it allowing you to tweak the wheel to your liking sounds very interesting as well. I'm looking forward to the release of the price.
Not sure how I missed that. Thanks for the heads up Jamie! That wheel does look very promising. I hope they plan on releasing it this year. I think most of us probably felt that way when we first tried the T500. It remains a great wheel but time for something better.
- http://insidesimracing.tv/forums/topic/8286-fanatec-review/ - if you read the first few posts you'll read about some Clayton McLeod guy and he seems really technically knowledgeable in FFB for all wheels. His quoted post on post 11 says "Master: 60% (This is the same as 100% in other wheels.* Beyond 60% risks extra clipping.)" - http://www.gtplanet.net/forum/threads/thrustmaster-t500rs-users-please-respond.284382/ - post 21 with a simple graph explaining the whole 60% vs more than 60% thing - http://members.iracing.com/jforum/posts/list/3198274.page - apparently this explains it as well.
This link in particular is AWESOME! Thank you spinelli. It explains how to use that WheelCheck program made by Clayton Macleod. Running tests now on my own wheel (as he advises) and initial tests at 60% show that the wheel is actually a bit more evenly spread out and linear (if you ignore the initial 0-8% deadzone and 94-100% deadzone/clipping) than the one shown in McLeod's consolidated graph. Here's my at 60% overall. Will reported back with more data soon.
Frankysco PM'ed me asking for the WheelCheck file as he didn't have an iracing account so i've uploaded it here for those who also do not having an iracing account. Edit (old link didn't work): http://ul.to/2e784k4f I went shopping and cooked dinner but continuing with the tests. Will post my wheels ffb graph soon.
Ok, here is my graph ranging from 10% to 100% in steps of 10% for the T500 with the 458 rim. The y-axis says "Degrees of rotation" but there is a linear relationship between the degrees of rotation and the amount of torque produced, so you could consider the y-axis to also represent torque: These results are much more consistent than the one produce by Clayton Macleod for the 100% ffb test (which is just a weird mess on his graph...not sure what was going on there). Now the 100% overall line is only producing a 8.5% higher peak torque than 60% overall (and not the sudden spike and 22% higher torque shown in Clayton Macleod's graph). I've made a 2nd graph so you can compare "60% overall" to "100% overall" more easily. I've also added a "60% scaled to 100%" so that (if you imagine) ingame how the ffb response curves compare when ingame if you use the same "car specific ffb multiplier" for both. You were bang on about the clipping for the 100% of course spinelli. But again, the way i've been using 100% overall is with 0.6 ingame (for the megane) and as i mentioned before my ffb bar never peaked past 60% which kept my working range withing 0-60% of the ffb effects strength (%) range so i never felt the clipping issue (60%-100%) unless driving over rumble strips and crashing. This would suggest that I'm actually get the same dynamic range as someone using 60% overall and 1.0 ingame. But what i notice with 100% overall is that i get stronger ffb feel in the lower end. This graph now explains why! For 100% overall there is an initial ffb deadzone from 0-2.4% (more accuracy reading the excel spreadsheet) and for 60% overall it's 0-8%. However, in reality my initial deadzone for 100% overall is 0-4% because as i said earlier, i use 100% overall with 0.6 ingame and my ffb dynamic range was 60%. So my effective initial deadzone is raised to 4% (2.5% / 60% * 100% = 4%). However small that may sound, you can really feel the difference in the lack of ffb in the low end and it also has the effect of offsetting the entire ffb range. So for example at 60% overal, 8% ffb feels like 0% ffb, 20% ffb feels like 12% ffb, 50% ffb feels like 42% ffb....etc, you get the idea. This is less pronounced with 100% overall and you feel the difference in game which is why i have favoured it thus far. Ideally, you want to use 60% overall because you get a tighter response curve (compared to 100% overall). It's also a linear throughout it's entire range but it would have been nice to have that extra 8.5% peak torque in the 100% overall. The crucial part is removing that initial ffb deadzone. The thread Spinelli posted had a solution for iracing, in the form of an ingame "Min force" offset input. This is a brilliant idea. Setting this to 8% would remove than initial deadzone of 0-8% for the T500 @ 60% overall. Does anyone know of such a way to do the same for the t500 either by some 3rd party software or via rf2?
I still have my CSR Elite and i did the same test on it: First observations: I did the test for two firmwares, an old firmware (737) vs the newest firmware that i knew had a difference in strength from experience. I knew the firmware 757 reduced the ffb strength vs the older firmware 737 but it's not as much as i thought it was. Firmware 757 only reduced the ffb strength to 90% of 737, not down to the 80% i thought it was. Next, the max difference torque difference between the T500 @ 60% overall vs CSR-Elite @100% is 1.67x (firmware 757) and 1.55x (firmware 737). These results are surprising to me, not as high as i thought it was going to be. However, my previous statements about it being at least 2x (maybe even 3x) the strength of the CSR-Elite is because soon after receiving my t500 i stuck it permanently on 100%. As you can see, if we compare just the initial 20-60% of the t500 @ 100% overall (as this is the most linear segment of the t500 @ 100% overall and we ignore the first 20% to avoid the initial deadzones of both wheels which will interfere with comparison otherwise) , from 5-60% the differences between t500 to csr-elite ranges from 2.32x - 3.42x the torque. These numbers are pretty much the orders of magnitude that i feel between my csr-elite and my t500 @ 100% overall but as i now know, this is not a fair comparison since the 100% is clipping from 60% upwards. All that being said, i want to use 60% overall now (or maybe even 70% as it gets close to the 100% peak torque whilst not loosing much of the 60%'s linearity!) but first i must find a way to remove the blasted initial ffb deadzone.
You're welcome DrR1pper! Lol this has gotten way too complicated for me though lol.So is raising the FFB over 60% then dropping it in-game too compensate better, or is the 60% area with a higher in-game setting better? People would probably think im an idiot, or crazy (or both) but I have always needed the small feelings really boosted even if it meant tons of clipping. With my Logitech Momo Racing and Momo Force wheels (plastic black, and metal red one), I need FFB at around 107% in profiler AND 100% in RFactor 1, and in GT Legends 120%-130% in the control panel combined with about 100% in game, lol. Probably has tons of clipping and way less range, and tons of effects in the middle to upper end getting drowned out, but I swear I feel more, or rather more of the important stuff that tells me about brake lockup, understeer, and all the teeny tiny stuff we need to feel BEFORE we get to the point of having to correct the car due to visually being able to see the mistake. (If you only correct once you can visually see the slide then you have already made too much of a big mistake and lost too much time, in real life most of these little slips and slides are being taken cared of by you before you or any on-board camera can visually see them, one of the main reasons why so many people think real-life cars are so much more stable than our sims, but that's a different subject). With the extra power of the T500 though are you saying we can keep it at 60%, or should we still raise it and then lower it in-game to compensate? (I currently have it set to 65% as a sort of compromise between the "optimal" 60% setting and weak effects boost, might raise this higher to 70%-80% depending on your findings).
I agree, lower end feedback detail is crucial and arguable more important so long as you dont clip the upper limit too much (ideally you want to set it to clip just before or at your maximum ffb felt around a track under race conditions). Using 60% creates a deadzone twice the size of 100%. I will post another graph in a about 10 mins or so to better demonstrate why i think 100% overall and 0.6 ingame is still better than 60% overall and 1.0 ingame. Edit: Well....i'm confused a $@*% now. I've just rechecked/repeated these results about 5 times. Deadzone for both are exactly identically the same. Both lines for the linear part are basically the exact $@*%ing same. I don't get it....i could swear that i feel a difference between them. Let me explain what it is your seeing in this graph. Blue line is 100% overall strength in TM control panel and green line is 60% strength in TM control panel. Using 100% overall with ffb 0.6 in rf2 i have found that the highest torque i feel is at around 60% of my overall dynamic range of ffb (shown in the pedal plugin). That means i never go into the 60-100% region when driving around a track except for situations that result in higher torque at the steering wheel, like when driving over rumble strips/kerbs or crashing. The result of which is ffb clipping as you can see on the graph with the blue line anything above 60% ffb effects strength is pretty much a flat constant torque output. Now, when using 60% overall with 1.0 ingame, the result is basically the exact frick'n same....only you use the entire dynamic range of ffb (0-100%) when driving around the track. If you drive over rumble strips/kerbs or crash the game physics will calculate more torque at the steering wheel but you have not got any more dynamic range of torque left in reserve to simulate higher torque situations and so your ffb is clipped at 100% despite the torque being calculated as vibrating (i.e. oscillating) at a higher torque range and so you don't feel it vibrating as well, you just feel a constant torque (because of clipping). Looking at the two lines also suggests that 100% overall is just plain bad in terms of its correlation (how much the data points are scatterd away from the trend line). There's a lot of spiking in the 100% overall compared to the much stronger correlation (tighter spread) of the data points in the 60% overall. I'm not sure why, perhaps it has something to do with enabling overvolting when you use 100% overall to get a little extra peak torque out of it which then messes up the accuracy of the torque output for all ranges of torque? That's just a wild guess....probably wrong, lol. So yeah....use 60% overall and ingame 1.0 and you should experience the exact same result. If only we could remove that god damn initial ffb deadzone and we'd have a near perfect linear response curve from 0% to 100% ffb effects strength. If we could (iracing has a feature built in to do this), this would be the new repsonse curve (in blue) which basically means you would feel ffb from the very start and as a consequence, all the lower end forces are actually raised (represented by height difference between blue and green line in the first 0-50% ffb effects strength). This would not be an artificial raising of the lower end ffb range....a perfectly linear response curve is what we should have/want to get the correct ffb feel. It is the low end that suffers for the t500. Being able to fix this would be sublime! By any chance Tim that you've read all this, is there any chance you could ask the devs (or perhaps some devs are reading this) to implement a solution for this similar to what iracing have done (with "Min force" offset) please?
Thanks mate, but I believe the link is broken, I can´t download it. It would be fantastic to have a ffb equalizer..
Thank you so mucho DrR1pper. Now I have to learn how make graphics.. I do a test but I don´t have any data
