From what we’ve seen of Project Cars 2 so far, it’s looking to be a gorgeous simulation driving game that has enough under the hood to give hardcore fans a lot to play with. It has been a significant effort for Slightly Mad Studios to get Project Cars 2 looking and running so well. We caught up with Slightly Mad COO Rod Chong recently for a wide-ranging interview, one part of which touched on Project Cars 2’s graphical abilities.
He told us that Slightly Mad is always looking to dial things up to 11 when it comes to the look and performance of its racing games. For frame rate specifically, Project Cars 2 runs at a bare minimum 60 FPS, because anything lower would mean “death.”
“You’re always pushing boundaries,” Chong said. “You’re always pushing new rendering features. New areas of the physics engine, which are taxing the processors more. If the performance starts dropping off or the frame rates are not maintained in the way that you want, that can be challenging. Our bare minimum is 60 frames per second. It must be 60 frames per second or death. The feeling of the car is not there [if the frame rate is] below that. Or if you’re in VR, you start getting ill below 60 frames per second. We have the optimisation worked out reasonably well now, but certainly there have been so moments where had to really push hard to optimise, optimise, optimise.”
Slightly Mad’s overall ambition with Project Cars 2 is to make the “most beautiful, most advance driving experience possible,” Chong told us. He added that he doesn’t see Project Cars 2 so much as a game as it is a racing simulator that professional drivers might even use to hone their on-track skills.
“It’s ultimately all about immersion and you always need to be pushing the look of the game,” Chong explained. “Simulation racing titles are a bit of an arms race if you look at the different titles out there. I think you can look at what we’ve achieved with the visuals and it kind of speaks for itself.”
Slightly Mad goes to the extreme to to ensure top-notch graphical quality for its games, Chong said. “There is a reason it’s called Slightly Mad Studios–seriously.”
Keep checking back with GameSpot for lots more from our conversation with Chong.
In other news, Slightly Mad recently talked about how the Xbox One X version of Project Cars 2 will look “significantly better” than the PS4 Pro edition. While Microsoft’s new console is impressively powerful, it can’t stand up to the rig you could create on PC. But outside of a high-end PC, the best-looking version of Project Cars 2 will be on Xbox One X, Slightly Mad game director Stephen Vijoen said.
Project Cars 2 launches on September 22 for PC, Xbox One, and PS4. For more, you can check out all the cars and all the tracks through GameSpot’s new videos below.
- Project Cars 2: All The Cars
- Project Cars 2: All The Tracks
