selnor said:
This. So many GT fans never REALLY understood why many PC gamers would tell you GT1, 2 or 3 or 4 or 5P was arcadey. Purely because PC sims have been doing between 300-420 hertz physics updates for ages. Why is this so important. Explanation time: If you have a bump in the road, lets say a sleeping police for arguements sake. It's 1 ft wide. At 138 miles an hour in a game which is 120hertz like NFS Shift or Gran Turismo 5P it is possible the game will simulate it as a competely normalflat piece of track. Why? Because at the speed it updates the physics it works out roughly that it's every 1.3 ft. So 120 Hertz at 138 miles an hour lets the game simulate every 1.3ft in the game, missing any bumps in the road that could affect handling between physics refresh times. Thats why in a game with 360 hertz at the same speedwill update every 3.9 inches. So will react to more bumps in the road leading to more realistic driving experience. This further applies to things like aerodynamics or tyre flex/deformation. The higher the physics refresh rates the more exact the physics simulation can be. |
That's most probably not how racing sims work, though, unless they are really more primitive than the stuff I've worked with.
If the sampling of the ground had a spacial frequency of 1.3ft then all hell would break loose in the behaviour of your suspensions when you meet the trackside bumps. What probably happens is integration of the forces over an interpolated trajectory between two physical clock ticks.
Thus higher physics clock would still lead to more precise response, but a lower clock does not really ignore anything that happens inbetween the steps. Only inbetween a smaller integration subdivision used every tick.
