Slightly Mad Studio’s wowed the gaming community when it showed off the original Project CARS for the very first time. The ambitious racing-sim was praised for its high level of visual fidelity. It was originally set to come to PS3, 360 and Wii U in addition to PC, but all of those consoles were dropped in favor of the much more powerful PS4 and Xbox One in order to fully realize the developers’ vision. Now, Slightly Mad is turning up the heat even further with the sequel.
Project CARS 2 will be racing its way onto consoles and PC later this year. It onces again sets to push the boundaries of the genre with a huge collection of cars, tracks, and more importantly, very detailed and realistic visual effects and gameplay mechanics. The game was showed off extensively during E3 2017, but more information has continued to come out.
With the power of PS4 Pro and Xbox One X now avaliable, Slightly Mad hopes to push the game even further with those platforms. Even so, it looks like the game may be so ambitious that it outpaces even the new supercharged systems.
According to the game’s director, Stephen Viljoen, the game is running under 60FPS even on Xbox One X. In addition to that, the team does not plan to achieve a ‘locked’ framerate, but will try and keep the level as close to that as possible. PS4 Pro and even the more powerful Xbox One X will not benefit from a native 4K resolution, unlike their exclusive racing simulators: GT Sport (PS4) and Forza Motorsport 7 (Xbox One X).
Viljoen took to GTPlanet’s forums to shed some light on the situation:
“We’re running sub 60 FPS at 4K and we’ll probably always be unless we drop livetrack and a host of other things… We’ll probably upscale from something very reasonable.”
On the topic of framerate, he had this to say:
“We don’t like the term ‘locked’. It would put us in first party territory where chest beating is more important than a great experience. We’ll be 60 most of the time in normal racing and we’ll push the consoles to and beyond their limits for more interesting racing. Even if that means dropping a few frames.”
This is definitely interesting. While other racing titles like GT Sport and Forza Motorsport 7 are all very detailed, Slightly Mad has even bigger goals with Project CARS 2. The new game is boasting complex features like dynamic time of day, dynamic weather conditions and very precise representations of all the cars that are featured in its roster. All of these things require a lot of processing power, thus the reason why the game is running at sub-60FPS and upscaled-4K even on the Xbox One X and PS4 Pro. As Viljoen mentioned, certain values could be lowered in order to achieve the full resolution and performance, but it looks like Slightly Mad doesn’t really want to make any sort of sacrifices, even if that means having players deal with lower frames and a lower resolution.
When you take into consideration that this is not the first nor only game on either PS4 Pro or Xbox One X to run under 60 frames and not feature a true 4K resolution, you can’t really blame Slightly Mad for wanting to run the systems up to the redline. Makes you wonder how things will be on the original PS4 and Xbox One…Even so, would you prefer that they dial it back just a bit at least to ensure that the game has a stable framerate?
Project CARS 2 will be racing onto PS4, Xbox One and PC on September 22nd.
