Project CARS

The ultimate racing game
User avatar
Ryzza5
Rookie
Rookie
Posts: 161
Joined: Wed Nov 26, 2014 12:47 am

The whole billboard thing was just a thankyou for promoting at trade shows, etc. i.e. at E3 and other places nVidia provided gaming PCs with the Titan Z iirc. In nVidia's own press events (Shield, etc) there were brief visual demos of pCARS along other games. Same deal with Panasonic - for a while if you went to a TV shop you could see a pCARS replay being demoed on their 4K TVs. Thrustmaster provided wheels as prizes for lap time competitions. This was all greatly appreciated as there wasn't much of a marketing budget. I'm not saying this based off one post I read last week, I was there (on the forums) as it all happened.
User avatar
MadManCK
Admin
Admin
Champion
Champion
Posts: 14086
Joined: Thu Sep 13, 2012 10:17 pm
Location: Amsterdam
Contact:

pCars is lucky it has been picked up by large corporations as a showcase. All the extra exposure benefits sales and makes the game a well known next gen must have. I simply think all recognized the gravity of the project and wanted a piece of the action to show it on their devices. That kind of exposure is priceless and beats normal advertising and commercials.

Nvidia has always been at the front rows when it comes to new, possible popular releases. Their attitude towards new games, development studios, interaction with the devs to demonstrate new technologies and finally incorporate exclusive technologies in games has made them market leaders of the Graphics card industry and a heavyweight in the gaming world.
AMD/ATI can do the same thing. They made a major coupe with the Sony and MS console chips. But are still lingering behind when it comes to game support with drivers. Last official WHQL driver update was from last year :roll:
AMD has also specific hardware tricks that are not supported by Nvidia. Maybe in this case it is good that it is MS that makes the DX protocols, so all new cards have to support the new features.

Last but not least. Accusing the SMS team was not a nice thing to do. Especially considering they took a risk and a new attitude to include the community in development procedures, to create a tailor made racing game. A unique project.

But fanboys are always biased and sometimes say things they shouldn't have.

Ian Bell has solved it, even conducted an internal investigation and gave some insights as well.

The real answer has to come from ATI/AMD, even if some think the development team should do all the optimization work.

To make a long story short: Physics calculations should be done by the GPU and not the CPU. :twocents-02cents:

:back to topic:
PC Player Image TDU, GRID, Assetto Corsa, pCars, NCG, The Crew, Dirt, Forza: MadManCK Clubs: TDU2: Luny's Fair Friends (VP-Exec), GRID AS: TDUDT (Pres) DT-Racing Team: Team Leader

Image Eden Games Can Kiss My Mustang
User avatar
Ryzza5
Rookie
Rookie
Posts: 161
Joined: Wed Nov 26, 2014 12:47 am

Did you get that last bit the wrong way around? GPU has enough stuff to do, CPU also runs at a faster clock speed.
User avatar
MadManCK
Admin
Admin
Champion
Champion
Posts: 14086
Joined: Thu Sep 13, 2012 10:17 pm
Location: Amsterdam
Contact:

Ryzza5 wrote:Did you get that last bit the wrong way around? GPU has enough stuff to do, CPU also runs at a faster clock speed.
No. The physics are best calculated by the shaders on the GFX card. The reason why the ATI cards are performing poorly is because of the 600 physics calculations each second that are now done by the CPU.
Shaders can be programmed to do a single task and so are the perfect match for these calculations. Most modern GFX have thousands of shaders (or cuda cores, or whatever they call them). These little co-processors are the reason why we can have a living gameworld with lots of interacting details.

CPU has a lot of raw processing power off course. But there is a reason why a lot of supercomputers are now using the GPU acceleration for complicated tasks.

:ugeek:
PC Player Image TDU, GRID, Assetto Corsa, pCars, NCG, The Crew, Dirt, Forza: MadManCK Clubs: TDU2: Luny's Fair Friends (VP-Exec), GRID AS: TDUDT (Pres) DT-Racing Team: Team Leader

Image Eden Games Can Kiss My Mustang
User avatar
Ryzza5
Rookie
Rookie
Posts: 161
Joined: Wed Nov 26, 2014 12:47 am

So AMD graphics cards are struggling because the graphics cards have less work to do?
User avatar
MadManCK
Admin
Admin
Champion
Champion
Posts: 14086
Joined: Thu Sep 13, 2012 10:17 pm
Location: Amsterdam
Contact:

Ryzza5 wrote:So AMD graphics cards are struggling because the graphics cards have less work to do?
Haha :lol: Sounds crazy, right?

But it is the bad optimized drivers, that let the CPU do the physics work, that makes the PC slow down. That results in a low FPS in pCars. A lot lower than it can be. With a proper driver optimizing, i expect up to 30-50% better FPS and a much more stable game for AMD users.
The shaders of AMD are very good. A while back some used AMD cards for datamining, like Bitcoin etc.
So when they get those shaders from their lazy beach chairs, i expect the AMD cards to perform well in pCars.

All of this could have been avoided with a better interaction between the SMS development team and the tech team from AMD.
And it took some angry AMD customers to wake them up.

Anyway, enough tech talk. :lol:

:back to topic:
PC Player Image TDU, GRID, Assetto Corsa, pCars, NCG, The Crew, Dirt, Forza: MadManCK Clubs: TDU2: Luny's Fair Friends (VP-Exec), GRID AS: TDUDT (Pres) DT-Racing Team: Team Leader

Image Eden Games Can Kiss My Mustang
User avatar
Ryzza5
Rookie
Rookie
Posts: 161
Joined: Wed Nov 26, 2014 12:47 am

Sounds plausible enough - the only problem is that the devs have confirmed that 90% of the physics is calculated on the CPU. GPU physics are mainly just for air/particle effects afaik.
User avatar
MadManCK
Admin
Admin
Champion
Champion
Posts: 14086
Joined: Thu Sep 13, 2012 10:17 pm
Location: Amsterdam
Contact:

Ryzza5 wrote:Sounds plausible enough - the only problem is that the devs have confirmed that 90% of the physics is calculated on the CPU. GPU physics are mainly just for air/particle effects afaik.
Quote from Ian Bell:
The software render person says that AMD drivers create too much of a load on the CPU. The PhysX runs on the CPU in this game for AMD users. The PhysX makes 600 calculations per second on the CPU. Basically the AMD drivers + PhysX running at 600 calculations per second is killing performance in the game.
And i have to stop here, as i don't know how the workload in pCars is devided between the CPU and GPU. For certain dedicated tasks, the GPU is more suitable and for the raw processing power the CPU. Getting the best possible results and game performance is for a large part the work of the devs. The dedicated driver setup is responsible for the end result on all video cards.
There are a lot of different types of physics calculations, for the cars, the interacting with the game world, the weather, the dust and so on.

A lot of smart people are working on it. So i expect a solution that will suit AMD card users as well.

But it does run excellent on Nvidia :mrgreen:
PC Player Image TDU, GRID, Assetto Corsa, pCars, NCG, The Crew, Dirt, Forza: MadManCK Clubs: TDU2: Luny's Fair Friends (VP-Exec), GRID AS: TDUDT (Pres) DT-Racing Team: Team Leader

Image Eden Games Can Kiss My Mustang
User avatar
Beardroid91
Hot Wheels
Hot Wheels
Posts: 4411
Joined: Thu Nov 29, 2012 5:38 pm
Location: Denmark

I'm very happy with how It runs perfectly on my system at 2560x1440p I'm getting 75 avg. fps, but it is interesting that PCars runs that much better on a GTX 970 then it does on the GTX 780 Ti according to those benchmarks :)

But a real shame about Radeon's drivers :(
User avatar
Ryzza5
Rookie
Rookie
Posts: 161
Joined: Wed Nov 26, 2014 12:47 am

I was going by stuff I had read from Griff, but happy to leave it there as it's inconsequential.
Post Reply

Return to “Project Cars”