I Tried iRacing For The First Time.

[Music] yes you read right the time has finally come [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] iracing is a sim racing title that i in full honesty thought i would never try its aged engine combined with the most predatory monetization model in the industry has always made me regarded as something i ethically just couldn't back while this may or may not remain the case one of my very kind community members decided to lend me his eye racing account so that i could get a feel for the sort of experience it actually provides as a result i packed an immense eye racing session into my weekend demoing the title across a variety of tracks and cars some of which i was intimately familiar with and others less so the result was a bunch of realizations and aha moments the likes of which the community was probably waiting on me to have for quite a while this video will categorically go through those the first thing you're hit with when you boot up eye racing is yellow so much god damned yellow it's as if the white balance style broke off on the yellow shift side back in 2008 the game started raking in tons of cash anyway and nobody subsequently ever sought to repair it [Music] you know what screw this i'm not going to desecrate my or your eyes for the rest of this video i'm going to manually fix the white balance myself for the rest of the footage so much better as a sim racer obviously the first thing you'll tend to respond to on any new driving sim is its overall feel and feedback to you as a driver each sim has its own unique way of conveying the driving experience with some coming from schools of thought more similar than others my first ever lap in iracing took place with the ferrari 48 gt3 at spielberg aka the red bull ring aka the austrian gp circuit aka the styrian gp circuit aka whatever the fia needs it called next my first impressions were surprisingly solid the car more or less behaved as i expected the break points were more or less where i expected them to be and my driving inputs for the most part were what i expected them to be across the track that is until i had my first run in with iracing's infamous passenger slides [Music] i very quickly learned where it earned its loving nickname ice racing but so long as i kept the car within the limits it generally behaved as expected there were even a few snaps here or there i was able to save before the car got away from me entirely the driving feel in iracing is very elastic and rubbery in that sense it reminded me someone of both automobilista 2 and rfactor2 while i wasn't expecting this it does make sense as all three titles could loosely be said to operate on physical tie models some fully in real time and others pre-baked with real-time elements while it would be a gross over-simplification to say that all three handled alike there are certain similarities which come out in various situations one of the big ones is driving on throttle this is a big area where eye racing deviates from the other behemoth of online sim racing acero corsa competition whereas acc demands exceptionally strict driving with the throttle only ever being pressed after an apex eye racing affords you a little more freedom like ams2 and rfactor 2 getting on the throttle early and rotating the rear end of the car with it doesn't spell the end of the world likewise yielding it over a high inside curb while not necessarily kind to your lap times won't necessarily lead to a broken canned slide initiating this is the facet of physical time modelling i've always liked some of the emerging card behaviors can be really compelling and forgiving in a way you often see in the real world but then again they can also lead to very bizarre behaviors such as in our factor ii seeing aliens drifting the car on throttle at 200 kph well beyond the slip limit of the tires or an ams2 simply getting on the throttle whenever you experience understeer and scrubbing the car back onto line in a way which would be highly inadvisable in the real world eye racing of course is not immune to this its preceding reputation talks of the cars going past the limit too easily and dropping into passenger slides where you simply have no option other than to ride it out after my all too brief dalliance with it i can confirm that it is indeed an issue that aside overall i was pleasantly surprised by the handling model based on what i've heard about it i expected far worse and to be honest i think i know why it relates to the force feedback there's no way to sugarcoat this the ffb in iracing sucks it's coarse grainy and makes my fanatec csl dd feel like the very first firmware and driver i used on my dd-1 which felt like a gear driven base with grain all over the place iracing has on a technical level one of the worst force feedback engines in sim racing it operates at a poultry 60 hertz in contrast this wheelbase is capable of accepting up to 1 000 hertz only around 16 times more resolution this core signal requires a ton of filtering in order to generate usable forces and what does filtering add yes that's right it adds latency which the more astute among you likely would have realized by now leads to even more issues preventing the aforementioned passenger slides before they happen the core force feedback information appears to be absent of any lateral forces aka seat of the pants effect hence compounding the limit driving situation even more much like acc if one is to catch a slip they're going to be using other cues such as the sound to do it that said it's not entirely unusable after the correct filters are applied and the wheelbase is dialed appropriately you can generally make it work for yourself it isn't a complete disaster but it's far from good or even acceptable given the vast amounts of money iracing demands its players pump into it the least they could do is bankroll a single coder to go in and redo the algorithm much as sector 3 recently did with raceroom completely overhauling the feeling and engagement of their simulation i believe the stock force feedback is one of the chief reasons that many players become disillusioned with the feel of iracing causing them to believe the physics are in fact far worse than they actually are with that being the case i can entirely understand why it's seen as mandatory by many eye-racing heavyweights to run irffb while i had a chance to thoroughly put the onboard force feedback through its paces and my eye-racing test i've unfortunately not had a chance to test irffb and as such can't report on the effect it has on the sim yet once again i can't help but feel that a sim charging as much as iracing does should not be relying on third-party software to complete its driver experience the track quality on iracing no matter which circuit i loaded up was quite good none of them had that flat aerial lidar feel with no surface variation it felt quite a lot like acc in that i could pick any track i wanted and get a reasonably good representation of it there is a very cool dynamic track system at playing eye racing much like the live track system in rfactor 2 as you drive around a green track you will transfer the rubber from your tyres onto the racing line eventually that will begin creating marbles on the road as well they also claim the track dynamically warms and cools according to the weather conditions as well as the cars driving over it that said many of the track models in there are showing their age the curbing at watkins glen looks out of date by about a decade and spa imola and the nurburgring are no exception while the track quality didn't feel quite as nuanced as what studio 397 have been churning out over the last few years it was more than adequate for some good racing given how much these tracks will cost you per pop a bit of modernization certainly wouldn't go astray while it's no race room dirt 2 or asceto corsa competizione with sounds eye racing can occasionally hold its own it's clear that in some cases sound recorders were sent out to the track to capture the sound of these cars this adds a much needed layer of authenticity to the driving experience and when you're paying on a per car basis certainly helps add a layer of unique identity and satisfaction to the purchase there's the standard array of diff wines engine raws transmission clunks underbody thunks curb ripples and everything else though it lacks the visceral edge presented by race room and acc's sounds from the interior perspective [Music] its external levels are quite balanced overall which makes a lot of sense given that eye racing is essentially made for broadcast purposes overall i would say the sounds are possible but i'm going to tingle your privates in that visceral way that the interior audi r8 diff wine and race room is going to [Music] no points for guessing why this is one of the last impressions fever aside the graphics in our racing are nothing to write home about while it's been impressively updated for a title from 2008 to be still playable in 2021 it doesn't hold a candle to a modern simulator such as assetto corsa comptizione or even the original assetto corsa after it's been spruced up with csp soul and all the other good stuff iracing have been gradually modernizing the engine with elements such as physically based rendering shaders to make surfaces look more realistic this is certainly going a long way toward retaining a broadcast quality look for the title though it's still not going to stand out and wow anyone in the same way the madness engine might [Applause] i'd wondered for a while where to nestle this comment whether it's more applicable to the physics or the graphics but given i had so much to say about the physics yet comparatively so little about the graphics i figure it could go here in order to pad out the section one of my litmus tests for simracing titles is how realistic the motion of cars looks from the exterior view as they move under load this is in fact what initially sold me on r factor 2 as i'd never before seen that level of flex and contortion in a race replay likewise the external behavior of cars and automobilista 2 can look very impressive if not a touch overstated and hyper realistic eye racing seems to hit the ideal middle ground it doesn't portray the bouncer armor of auto mobilista 2 nor the high speed drifting of rfactor 2 yet it also doesn't remain so conservative as to make the cars look like they're floating over the track like assetto corsa comfetione from the exterior view the races look compelling with the cars moving and swaying as one might expect when they're racing hard doubtless a lot of effort was put into the external presentation of iracing in order to make it widely marketable as the idyllic online broadcast platform for sim racing now if someone would just fix that bloody white balance slider amazingly it just so happened that during the weekend i was testing iracing for the first time a buddy of mine was running a community race thus i managed to test out how the faithful mx-5 fares in door-to-door racing across the treacherous alton park and mount panorama circuits much to my dismay the collision calculations in that code were for the most part great when bumping into each other the cars behaved as expected and allowed some very close racing this is at odds with what i'd heard and it was a little disappointing given that i went in gung-ho to completely tear eye-racing a new one here obviously my experience racing only in a single class of car can't be considered definitive and i'd need a lot more experience here to form anything resembling a conclusive opinion disclaimer aside the online experience was very fun and it's obvious that much of the focus of iracing if not the vast majority of it lies here i didn't get to dive into the ranked ecosystem whatsoever so this review continues to mostly focus on the core driving experience [Music] wyoming you paramount paragon of objectivity i hear you say how can you dedicate an entire section just to the nordschleifer well dear viewer you clearly don't know which channel you're watching the nordschleifer not only got me into simracing but also ranks as one of the great loves of my life so of course it's going to get its own section heck i could even give it its own video series for now we'll just have to settle with the one lap in order to break up the scripted pacing of this video i want to inject an uncut full lap of the nordschleifer here namely my first ever lap of the nordschleifer in iracing a special occasion to be sure it was the first time lap i drove after completing the outlap from the pits in a car i know very well the porsche 911 gt3 this car and track form a very special combination not only because they often win the n24 but also because they test several aspects of the physics engine of a sim the high curbing puts an exceptional load on the physics engine to render the limits of car behavior correctly the wide variety of corners essentially renders just about every potential situation a car might encounter meanwhile the car itself being uniquely rear-engined allows us to test for off-throttle rotation mid-corner corrections traction under power and last but not least fully sick gearbox wine so let's have at it alright starting the lap coming up to the new sabine schmidt's curve you can already see i'm balancing the car lots of mid-corner corrections that rubbery feel i spoke about and i racing really coming into its own bear in mind this is my very first lap in this car on this track you know racing ever sans the outlap massive push down through into hudson buck you can see i'm already i'm already feeling the limit of the car it's extremely intuitive based on the well possibly thousands of laps well thousands of virtual apps i've done here over time one thing i was tremendously impressed by here with iracing is how well it handled limit feel how well it handled limit driving how well it allowed me to actually sense the parameters of the car as it was guided all around the uh hudson bark sector so coming up to fluke plots now heading out all the way straight i'm using all the experience i know driving this in r factor driving it in ams2 driving it in ac and it's all applying very effortlessly and very naturally i've yet to over push the car i've yet to feel like i've pushed it past its limits if anything i feel like during certain situations the car has too much grip if anything all right so heading down here into schwingenkotz car a little bit of a lift off the throttle there hard on the brakes coming down to ironburg pushing quite hard you can see lots of mid corner corrections feeling for grip one thing that this game has head and shoulders above acc the ability to feel the limit slip mid corner to allow you to adjust even without that seat of the pants sensation and force feedback it still just makes you feel like you're there it's way more engaging dropping down to fifth flying over the curb there coming up into adenauer force now slowing well down seeing what the car does at slow speed here touching the curves using the extremes of the track no problems with curbing and eye racing it handles curbing no worries one of the hallmarks of most of the physically modelled tire simulators i've ever driven is they have fairly good curb behaviors [Applause] still feeling for that limit well into sector two here now this is where things start to get exciting of course this is where the turns get a little bit more cambered a little bit more exciting as i push out of the exit there using almost all the curb on the exit extremely high curbs here at the nurburgring really allow you to feel the car's behavior at the limits pushing through miss hit miss there quite hard actually um the car is instilling confidence even here into the slowest corner of the track just push right in grab a bit of the inside curb and again what correcting for the slip on the exit again car very communicative there at the limit one of the very strange things about racing on one hand yes you have those passenger slides but before you get to the passenger slide you feel like you have all the control in the world once again very engaging driving style i have to say all by society i felt very engaged driving the 911 here at the norch life it's something that i found myself wanting to do again and again and again even just by myself to see how much i could improve on my lap time [Applause] [Music] coming up here into one of the largest power sections of the track of course mostly uphill [Applause] get a feel for the pbr shading of the track as the sun is about to bounce off the surface of the road you can see probably a better pbr implementation than that of our factory i've got to say track looks somewhat less washed out even with iracing's very aged graphics engine coming up here literally just letting off the throttle letting liftoff oversteer do all the work for us i was advised that you would not experience much liftoff uh oversteer on the porsche however i found that wasn't the case i drove this much as i expected to drive it braking very powerful actually i find the brakes to be a lot more confidence inspiring in our racing than many other sims so that's another point to its advantage and coming up into the carousel for the first time how easy will it be very very easy to keep it in the carousel another hallmark of the physically model tyre sims i generally find very similar to the feel of that of ams 2 in the carousel now coming up into sector 3 my absolute favorite section in all of motorsport gonna be very very exciting flying uphill absolutely threading the needle there using the curve at the extreme feeling for grip mid corner pushing the car in using a hybridized r factor and a ms2 driving approach [Applause] able to absolutely munch those kerbs on the inside there through whip em and cast sliding out on the exit as you can see you can drive it to the limit again you absolutely can drive it to the limit it's just about when it goes past it that feather edge of when it goes past it but i've yet to reach that on the slap i'm just feeling it out just surfing the car right at the very edge of its adhesion to the road and that's that's really where the joy and the fun of sim racing is in my opinion are pushing yet again flying over the inside curb as you would in real life of course no weird jagged curve bouncing behaviors like which you would see in acn acc [Music] now flying down towards one of the most terrifying sections of the track all flat out down here car adhering to the track surface very well jumping dipping into the cambering and drop a gear turn in use the arrow have confidence in the car and again i go wide unfortunately i get understeer on the exit i go out or and on the limit car still manages to recover itself even off the grass mini carousel no worries this is one area that was a little bit different to most the other sims i've driven now coming back here you normally have to coast and then gradually get on the power but i absolutely floated here flat out on the throttle still managed to catch the exit didn't go wide on the exit that seemed a little bit too a little bit too confidence inspiring for me but coming out onto dirt in yahoo here for the first time i mean i feel pretty good i feel pretty good about the lap i actually can't believe how close to the edge i managed to drive the car on my very first outing on the track i felt like i've done this hundreds of times before which i've gotta say all by society is a feather in the cap of eye racing i mean all the things i've heard about its driving model surely i should have had a lot more trouble doing my first lap of this track and this car that i know owes so well from other sims but the experience wasn't all that different now braking hard here coming up towards the end of the track [Applause] just feeling for that group feeling for that grip and yet again last corner here we go pushing out wide using all the track or one lap of the nurburgring notchlifer well what better way to conclude this video than with a lap of the nordschleifer in a 911 gt3 what more could i really add to that you didn't actively experience with me in there my high school teacher would slay me for this as i was told to never introduce new information during a conclusion but i just can't help myself i have to give a very special mention to the menu and control setup wizard which makes setting up the controls for the car as well as the force feedback and absolute breeze while it's not the next level ui that raceroom brings to the table it's certainly a lot better than some others given my expectations going in overall i was somewhat pleasantly surprised by eye racing it didn't blow my mind it had drawbacks where i was told to expect drawbacks and just like every other sim it has its strong points and its weak points it's certainly not the silver bullet hyper-realistic solution the developers or their indoctrinated cultists would paint it as however it's also not the awful mess that some of the others who flee the race room acc or rfactor 2 would try to paint it as either one thing it definitely does seem to be is way overpriced for what it provides sans the curated online ecosystem there is nothing especially revolutionary about driving and iracing it can be fun sure but it can also be frustrating and needlessly so at that if the developers were ever to see fit to rewrite their force feedback engine fix the tyre behavior at the limits modernize their tracks decide on whether they want to charge a subscription fee or a content fee rather than both and finally bloody de-yellow everything i might consider delving into their ecosystem and giving it a proper good bash if you enjoy eye racing more power to you far be it for me to tell anyone what to do with their time or money but for the time being at least you probably won't see me racing door to door with you in yellow land anytime soon make sure to subscribe to the channel become a member to get cool perks check out the links below to get sick gear that will get you driving god-like nordschleife lapse your first time around and of course until the next one i'll see you all later you

Channel: Ermz

Views: 113,595

Keywords: Jimmy Broadbent, Super GT, eSports, Sim Racer, tiametmarduk, Sim Racing, Best multiplayer racing game, iRacing review

Id: x2dS2WoPJQw

Length: 24min 27sec (1467 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 23 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/duck74UK]

Something I read in the comments of that video and then realised for myself is that. He doesn't really talk about the main draw of iRacing, which is the pick-up racing system that also encourages drivers to be safe while still driving hard.

He didn't do any official races as far as I can tell.

Like, I buy the sub because instead of having to sign up to a league to get a good race, I can just sign up for something on iRacing, at any hour of the day, and bam, it's a race where all the drivers don't intentionally spin you every time. You get a pretty good experience in 90% of your races, with the latter 10% being turn 1 lap 1, but irl has that same issue too tbh.

That said, I do agree with most of what he says. And I do think iRacers should be demanding more from the most expensive racing sim on the market.

[u/sdw3489]

The problem with someone like Ermin who has a preconceived dislike for what iracing is and provides is that he went into this review looking for all the issues he was told about. Rather than just experiencing it for what it is and formulating his own opinion.

Also not providing context around certain things. FFB is a big one. Everyone just loves to say iRacings FFB is bad without the understanding that iracing just has a different philosophy and approach to FFB. they only simulate the steering rack forces while all other sims add extra seat of the pants effects. It’s reasonable to say that you prefer the experience of other sims with the added effects but it’s not fair to say iRacings is “bad”. It’s just different.

I think his nords lap at the end encapsulates the iracing experience well. It’s engaging. Great example of the whole package being greater than it’s parts. You can pick out individual things that you may not like. But the overall experience just feels right.

[u/F1_US]

The point of Iracing is multiplayer. But the other thing that doesn't get enough praise is iracing special events. No other sim can match the endurance racing participation of iracing. ACC just had a 24 hour event, but only the elite teams could qualify, and there was only 1 split. The rest of the community just didn't get to race.

I love racing with the team on special events, they are special and something to look forward to. Beyond that, I've made real friends. That's worth every iracing penny.