Project CARS Benchmarked, Tested

[Steve]

Project CARS (or Community Assisted Racing Simulator) is a racing simulation game that's been on everyone's radar since its drool-inducing visuals started to make the rounds as far back as 2012.

Like Gran Turismo and Forza Motorsport before it, Project CARS intends to deliver a highly realistic driving simulation. But to distinguish it from the pack, developer Slightly Mad Studios has made the game an open experience that allows players to choose from a variety of motorsports paths and grants immediate access to all tracks and vehicles.

Project CARS was built on top of an improved version of the Madness engine, which was the basis for the Need for Speed: Shift titles. In short, the game looks amazing and is the most visually impressive racing simulator we have ever seen.

Read the complete article.

 

[Evernessince]

I can't believe that TechSpot and the game devs are trying to pin this whole thing on AMD.

Even without optimization, no game should run this bad. There are plenty of indie games being made that have no contact with AMD or Nvidia with smaller teams and yet they seem to be able to optimize for both just fine.

I think those who are voicing their concern about Nvidia being plastered on everything in the game definitely have a point. This game isn't just un-optimized, it's downright sad what AMD users are getting.

People on the steam forms are reporting deficiencies between the earlier build and the final one
http://steamcommunity.com/app/234630/discussions/0/613957600528900678/#p23

As in, the final release greatly reduces frames for AMD users.

There is no excuse, ever, to release a game is such a poor state for a large portion of users. I find it hard to believe a company that doesn't accept any responsibility for the state of it's own game.

 

[rp1367]

Woww!! GTX 960 is powerfull than R9 290x? Who is gonna believe that the game was not poorly coded for AMD users? Havent seen a game that is not balance for the other graphic brand (AMD) user unless it was intentionally coded to underperform. Only a grade school students would ever believe on this type of review. The game graphics is execellent but there is something fishy behind it. There is a reason for me now not to buy this game and in its future game realeses. Disgusting!

 

[Roman Galda]

I can't believe that Techspot and the Game Devs are trying to pin this whole thing on AMD.

Even without optimization, no game should run this bad. There are plenty of indie games being made that have no contact with AMD or Nvidia with smaller teams and yet they seem to be able to optimize for both just fine.

I think those who are voicing their concern about Nvidia being plastered on everything in the game definitely have a point. This game isn't just un-optimized, it's downright sad what AMD users are getting.

People on the steam forms are reporting deficiencies between the earlier build and the final one
http://steamcommunity.com/app/234630/discussions/0/613957600528900678/#p23

As in, the final release greatly reduces frames for AMD users.

There is no excuse, ever, to release a game is such a poor state for a large portion of users. I find it hard to believe a company that doesn't accept any responsibility for the state of it's own game.

So how do you explain this? For those who have AMD GPUs, I asked the big boss Ian Bell the permission to post what he said about AMD's putting the blame on SMS for the perf's problem:

We've provided AMD with 20 keys for game testing as they work on the driver side.

But you only have to look at the lesser hardware in the consoles to see how optimised we are on AMD based chips.

What can I say but he should take better stock of what's happening in his company. We're reaching out to AMD with all of our efforts. We've provided them 20 keys as I say. They were invited to work with us for years.

Looking through company mails the last I can see they (AMD) talked to us was October of last year.

Categorically, Nvidia have not paid us a penny. They have though been very forthcoming with support and co-marketing work at their instigation.

We've had emails back and forth with them yesterday also. I reiterate that this is mainly a driver issue but we'll obviously do anything we can from our side.

 

[Guest]

Another note, in racing sims 30fps is quite often not enough - an input lag of even a few ms can throw you off, for example when you try to catch/prevent a skid, and 30fps max implies ~33ms frame latency. It's not about the graphics in hardcore racing sims, it's about the feel... not that we mind good graphics and all the extra jazz

 

[dividebyzero]

Woww!! GTX 960 is powerfull than R9 290x? Who is gonna believe that the game was not poorly coded for AMD users? Havent seen a game that is not balance for the other graphic brand (AMD) user unless it was intentionally coded to underperform.

Well, ComputerBase also tested the game and found that AMD's DX11 driver overhead might be a cause for concern and possible culprit since the performance deficit seems more reliant upon CPU clockspeed than Nvidia's offerings. Not a completely unknown occurrence (as Eurogamer's results here and here show)- hence AMD's prioritization of Mantle.

The game graphics is execellent but there is something fishy behind it.

Well, we've heard from the game dev, and if there is something clandestine happening I would have thought AMD would have released a statement since the game has been pretty comprehensively covered in reviews. It's not as if either graphics vendor is shy about outing the other at the drop of a hat (Nvidia's Gameworks program got an instant response from AMD not so long ago).

As in, the final release greatly reduces frames for AMD users

So, did AMD's GPU performance go from stunning to garbage? and if so, how was it that earlier game performance reviews were reporting much the same deficiencies?

Might be interesting to see how the 290X scales with CPU clockspeed (min/average framerate, CPU utilization, GPU utilization) versus the 980/970 under the same conditions.

 

[rp1367]

I can't believe that Techspot and the Game Devs are trying to pin this whole thing on AMD.

Even without optimization, no game should run this bad. There are plenty of indie games being made that have no contact with AMD or Nvidia with smaller teams and yet they seem to be able to optimize for both just fine.

I think those who are voicing their concern about Nvidia being plastered on everything in the game definitely have a point. This game isn't just un-optimized, it's downright sad what AMD users are getting.

People on the steam forms are reporting deficiencies between the earlier build and the final one
http://steamcommunity.com/app/234630/discussions/0/613957600528900678/#p23

As in, the final release greatly reduces frames for AMD users.

There is no excuse, ever, to release a game is such a poor state for a large portion of users. I find it hard to believe a company that doesn't accept any responsibility for the state of it's own game.

So how do you explain this ?
For those who have AMD GPUs
I asked the big boss Ian Bell the permission to post what he said about AMD's putting the blame on SMS for the perf's problem

We've provided AMD with 20 keys for game testing as they work on the driver side.

But you only have to look at the lesser hardware in the consoles to see how optimised we are on AMD based chips.

What can I say but he should take better stock of what's happening in his company. We're reaching out to AMD with all of our efforts. We've provided them 20 keys as I say. They were invited to work with us for years.

Looking through company mails the last I can see they (AMD) talked to us was October of last year.

Categorically, Nvidia have not paid us a penny. They have though been very forthcoming with support and co-marketing work at their instigation.

We've had emails back and forth with them yesterday also. I reiterate that this is mainly a driver issue but we'll obviously do anything we can from our side.

Cant you see something fishy? "Categorically, Nvidia have not paid us a penny" is a reverse phychology. Have you seen the race track where almost all corners of the race track has Nvidia ads? You may tell that to the kids but as an adult consumer like me it is pretty obvious. The game was coded and was released and not even at par with the other brand stronger series. GTX 960 is stronger that R9 290x? Yes for sure Nvidia fans are really happy on this benchmark review results but as a consumer like me can easily tell what is happening at the backdoor.

 

[Guest]

I suggest everyone reads these posts (or the whole thread in general):
http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=37388276&postcount=204
http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=37388287&postcount=205
http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=37388931&postcount=257

 

[Steve]

I can't believe that Techspot and the Game Devs are trying to pin this whole thing on AMD.

TechSpot isn’t blaming anyone, we simply stated the facts as they have come to us. I have been speaking with multiple sources at AMD and they all tell us “AMD” is working on a driver fix..

Roy Taylor said “Right now the performance is an anomaly, since clearly Radeon should perform dramatically better than it does. There is no ‘smoking barrel’ here. No conspiracy, we have been talking and working together for some time and we just need to now dig in and identify the issue. Sometimes these things happen, unfortunate when they do but between us we are confident we will fix the problem.”

Even without optimization, no game should run this bad. There are plenty of indie games being made that have no contact with AMD or Nvidia with smaller teams and yet they seem to be able to optimize for both just fine.

I don’t disagree but comparing indie games to a AAA title doesn’t really make sense as indies don’t push systems to the limit and take advantage of cutting edge graphics technology. When building a game that sets a new benchmark for visuals things like this can happen.

AMD are probably copping the blame because they didn’t follow the development closely enough.

Woww!! GTX 960 is powerfull than R9 290x? … Only a grade school students would ever believe on this type of review.

You saw right through our cunning plan to fool you all.

Another note, in racing sims 30fps is quite often not enough - an input lag of even a few ms can throw you off, for example when you try to catch/prevent a skid, and 30fps max implies ~33ms frame latency. It's not about the graphics in hardcore racing sims, it's about the feel... not that we mind good graphics and all the extra jazz

Don’t disagree, we were suggesting a ‘minimum’ of 30fps be as low as gamers should go.

Cant you see something fishy? "Categorically, Nvidia have not paid us a penny" is a reverse phychology. Have you seen the race track where almost all corners of the race track has Nvidia ads? You may tell that to the kids but as an adult consumer like me it is pretty obvious. The game was coded and was released and not even at par with the other brand stronger series. GTX 960 is stronger that R9 290x? Yes for sure Nvidia fans are really happy on this benchmark review results but as a consumer like me can easily tell what is happening at the backdoor.

I wouldn’t assume to know the working relationship here, I suggest you wait until more facts are released or a new driver

 

[Axle Grease]

In fact, AMD *has* released a statement of sort...
----
Roy@AMD @amd_roy
Great chat with Ian, we love @projectcarsgame and are working with them now. Update to follow shortly, rest assured AMD on Project Cars."
----
Yes, that's right Radeon users. Roy Taylor has been paid off by Jen-Hsun Huang to make it appear as though your very awesome conspiracy theories are without substance. The unscrupulous bastid. Go tweet him a damn good thrashing.

 

[Alpha Gamer]

Steve, thanks for including the 2500k in the last two benchmark sessions.
Off topic: Witcher 3 preload is on.

 

[SuperVeloce]

The thing you all need to know is that AMD and Nvidia needs to repair developer errors in almost every game released. It's not other way around, there is nothing wrong with "un-optimised" driver for specific game, but the game itself is (usually) sorta broken.

 

[hahahanoobs]

I LOVE the addition of the minimum framerates for the GPU's and the CPU's!!! And you did it in a way that makes the charts that much more pleasing to look at. Also loving the return of the 2500K in the CPU performance section. Great job guys, great job!

The Kepler performance, or lack thereof is unfortunate. Hopefully these results will make enough waves that forces nVIDIA to reconsider their strategy in that regard.

 

[Jad Chaar]

Pretty disappointed at optimization... this game got me so hyped up. I love cars and having a game that simulates it perfectly got me excited... but now I am a bit disappointed. Hopefully AMD can iron out their drivers and the developers can optimize their game. I was excited to see the low system requirements but now I question them .

Thanks Steve, for a great review as usual .

 

[Cryio]

I was excited to see the low system requirements but now I question them .

Recommended specs doesn't mean a game will run maxed out at 60 fps in 1080p+

 

[Moxiy]

Wonderful review Steve. The game sure does look stunning, can't wait to get my hands on it

 

[Puiu]

CPU wise AMD's drivers should perform much better (it is know that they have better multithreading). The overhead people are talking is actually the PhysX engine used by the game which works much better on NVIDIA cards.
Because of this the framerates tank and are much more influenced by CPU performance when you use an AMD card.

What the devs of Project CARS are asking is for AMD to create a workaround for NVIDIA's GameWorks.

And I do believe that free marketing is a form of payment.

 

[Guest]

Benchmarks aside tho, I heard the game handles like a Need for speed shift. Which was a dog in my mind. Reading someone say that about this game is enough to put me off. Hope they have a demo to testes.

 

[Peter Farkas]

Do you guys remember Crysis 2? It was an "Nvidia The way it's meant to be played" title. And AMD GPUs performed suprisingly bad in the benchmarks? Then it turned out they intentionally put a sea below each map, that the GPU was still rendering, though it was never visible. And that this didnt cause issues for Nvidia GPUs, but screwed AMD?? That was pretty ugly. These guys have a lot of dirty tricks going on in the background... This is how the game is meant to be played between Nvidia and AMD... lol

 

[Cryio]

Do you guys remember Crysis 2? It was an "Nvidia The way it's meant to be played" title. And AMD GPUs performed suprisingly bad in the benchmarks? Then it turned out they intentionally put a sea below each map, that the GPU was still rendering, though it was never visible. And that this didnt cause issues for Nvidia GPUs, but screwed AMD?? That was pretty ugly. These guys have a lot of dirty tricks going on in the background... This is how the game is meant to be played between Nvidia and AMD... lol

It didn't screw nothing. The water stuff and tessellation on the chest-high barriers did almost nothing to performance. Water, tessellated or not, was there from the beggining, in DX9, wasting performance anyway. It really didn't affect performance almost at all on both sides.

 

[hahahanoobs]

Do you guys remember Crysis 2? It was an "Nvidia The way it's meant to be played" title. And AMD GPUs performed suprisingly bad in the benchmarks? Then it turned out they intentionally put a sea below each map, that the GPU was still rendering, though it was never visible. And that this didnt cause issues for Nvidia GPUs, but screwed AMD?? That was pretty ugly. These guys have a lot of dirty tricks going on in the background... This is how the game is meant to be played between Nvidia and AMD... lol

It didn't screw nothing. The water stuff and tessellation on the chest-high barriers did almost nothing to performance. Water, tessellated or not, was there from the beggining, in DX9, wasting performance anyway. It really didn't affect performance almost at all on both sides.

And it was eventually fixed meaning AMD and the developer could of caught it before release, but they didn't. Same with the first two Batman Arkham games.

 

[GhostRyder]

Well for starters guys, Techspot nor @Steve are biased so that basis is completely unjustified as they are reporting what they see nothing more and nothing less.

As far as the issues go, it looks like AMD is working on a driver fix and probably this month we will get a new driver that will (Hopefully) resolve the issues.

As for the Kepler debate, I have been hearing that recently from a lot of people as well that they are ignoring the old generation. It has been an on-going debate for a long time (Like Fermi was to Kepler). It looks to be true as well though maybe a new driver will come with optimizations to alleviate this issue.

Last, as far as the whole are they being paid by NVidia to do bad coding on AMD...Well who know honestly but I do feel there is at least something along the lines of assistance from NVidia otherwise they would not have so many add's plastered in their game for them. But I do not think they intentionally hindered the hardware, more than likely they just did not do much testing on AMD hardware because AMD did not work with them enough.

Excellent review @Steve !

 

[cliffordcooley]

But I do not think they intentionally hindered the hardware, more than likely they just did not do much testing on AMD hardware because AMD did not work with them enough.

That's what I was thinking.

Personally I think AMD has had restructuring as a top priority, and chose not to pay this much attention until their priority list has been taken care of. Seriously why waste time optimizing for drivers that will most certainly change drastically in an upcoming platform.

If we want to see great things from AMD, we have to be patient with them as they work to vindicate their past short comings. This is something I could forsee the day AMD said they would no longer be computing with Intel head-on. I had suspicions AMD needed to hide in the shadows while they came up with a new plan.

Do we want AMD using man hours optimizing a single game or concentrating on the next generation of computing?

 

[Evernessince]

So how do you explain this? For those who have AMD GPUs, I asked the big boss Ian Bell the permission to post what he said about AMD's putting the blame on SMS for the perf's problem:

We've provided AMD with 20 keys for game testing as they work on the driver side.

But you only have to look at the lesser hardware in the consoles to see how optimised we are on AMD based chips.

What can I say but he should take better stock of what's happening in his company. We're reaching out to AMD with all of our efforts. We've provided them 20 keys as I say. They were invited to work with us for years.

Looking through company mails the last I can see they (AMD) talked to us was October of last year.

Categorically, Nvidia have not paid us a penny. They have though been very forthcoming with support and co-marketing work at their instigation.

We've had emails back and forth with them yesterday also. I reiterate that this is mainly a driver issue but we'll obviously do anything we can from our side.

When your entire post is a quote from the article, you might as well not bother, you can't seem to think of anything to say.

As I said in my comment, these Devs do nothing but try to blame AMD with this. I can't say I believe any of it after debacles with EA and Ubisoft.

TechSpot isn’t blaming anyone, we simply stated the facts as they have come to us. I have been speaking with multiple sources at AMD and they all tell us “AMD” is working on a driver fix..

Your words
"So it seems AMD have been slacking off, something we have certainly noticed this year."

This statement is past tense, meaning are already believe that AMD has done something.

So, did AMD's GPU performance go from stunning to garbage? and if so, how was it that earlier game performance reviews were reporting much the same deficiencies?

Might be interesting to see how the 290X scales with CPU clockspeed (min/average framerate, CPU utilization, GPU utilization) versus the 980/970 under the same conditions.

I'm sure if you cherry pick your results, from a less than reputable source, you can get benchmarks to say whatever you want.

http://www.pcgameshardware.de/Proje.../Project-Cars-Bechmarks-Grafikkarten-1106410/

Here's another less than reputable website's benchmark from 2014 that states AMD's performance as good.

 

[LNCPapa]

One reason journalists have to site all their sources is quite often when people try to "think of something to say" they end up filling in the things that they don't know details about with garbage or bias based on their own personal experiences. People with different experiences will think it's crap and we eventually spiral into these flame wars or incredibly unproductive crap-flinging threads.

I tend to give most people (developers included except EA) the benefit of the doubt. Who wants to make something and then intentionally cripple it other than a sociopath? I think too many people work too hard and pour so much of themselves into these projects for there to be as much conspiracy as people seem to think there is. If evidence comes out that it was intentional... and that evidence is shared with me then it's a different story. For now I'll believe SMS.