Years on from its inception as a devoted PC project, Slightly Mad Studio's shift to current-gen consoles involves some cutbacks, though Project Cars is still very much intact as a technically accomplished racing sim. Both PlayStation 4 and Xbox One use a hybrid of PC presets, with insights from the rendering team suggesting that a bulk of these waver around its medium setting (with aspects of high). But given this is two steps below the PC's top-end ultra setting, is this enough to truly drive home the quality of the game's visuals on console - or are the differences minor in practice?
Resolution
As confirmed by the team itself, Sony's machine continues to push out a native 1920x1080 image, while Microsoft's hardware musters an upscaled 1600x900. The results are unfortunately not always flattering for Xbox One's final image, even with the team's choice of EQAA in place (also in effect on PS4).
AA:
On PS4 this works well with the native 1080p framebuffer, and the final picture is much better presented. Geometric lines are mostly clear, though it's still vulnerable to other forms of artefacting we'll cover shortly. Xbox One doesn't fare as well, producing more visual noise on metal barriers, while chrome highlights on cars in the garage suffer from glaring saw-tooth artefacts. Motion blur is in effect on both, which helps to hide most of the flickering during a drive. Even so, the black contours in cockpit view are a constant reminder of Xbox One's lower resolution base image.
By comparison, the PC's image is set to 1920x1080 for our tests, and we're offered a huge range of in-menu options to treat aliasing. Slightly Mad provides the full toolkit: multiple levels of FXAA, SMAA, and MSAA are all present and correct.
There's no way consoles can compete with that, but the PS4 edition has an interesting workaround. In addition to EQAA, a 'temporal aliasing' pass is added to the Sony release, blending the previous frame with the current one to reduce flicker on moving objects. During gameplay this works surprisingly well in minimising pixel crawl, but the implementation here is a divisive one. The downside is simple: it creates a ghost image that's very easy to spot in static images, and the effect is noticeable in motion too.
AF:
Unfortunately, texture filtering isn't a high point for Project Cars. Ground textures on console make use of what appears a match for PC's 4x anisotropic filtering mode, though PS4 produces blurrier results than Xbox One overall. It's not a concern when a race kicks off, but waiting at a starting grid shows these crisp textures tailing off sharply in quality within a few metres - especially on Sony's console. PC surges forward here with its top-end 16x setting, and circuits like Willow Springs International Raceway benefit hugely from an ultra grass setting, increasing the range at which small foliage is rendered (where consoles use the PC's low setting).
Shadows:
However, as spotted in the hands-on build, Xbox One produces aliased shadows while in cockpit view that aren't noticed on PS4.
Performance:
As established in our earlier analysis, PS4 does also have an advantage in performance. To re-cap quickly, Project Cars' read-out is typically 60fps in its career mode, with tearing and drops below 50fps once rain kicks in. Stress-tests also show a PS4 advantage once 30+ cars are engaged, while Microsoft's platform takes a bigger hit on hectic races with heavy alpha effects. Tearing is constant in these 30-40fps stress-test scenarios, but in the interest of keeping render times as close as possible to the 16.67ms target, dropping v-sync helps to keep the visual update as rapid as possible - if at a cost to image quality.
With regards PC optimisation, the state of performance is uneven between the two major GPU vendors right now. As it stands, there is a trend of AMD cards falling short of their Nvidia's equivalents; even the top-tier R9 290X reportedly struggling against a lowly GTX 760 at 1080p and high settings. We carried out a very quick replay test using the R9 290X and the GTX 970 - two pretty closely matched cards - finding that the Nvidia advantage in one specific scene was a mammoth 77 per cent, with generally poor performance on the Radeon card overall. Based on the results Slightly Mad has achieved with AMD hardware on console, clearly the codebase isn't badly optimised for GCN hardware, suggesting a driver issue is to blame.
Verdict:
Slightly Mad Studios' racer leaves a high watermark for Polyphony Digital and Turn 10 to match in the coming years. Crucially, both console versions get the attention they deserve, and between the huge car count, dynamic weather and use of PhysX, both PS4 and Xbox One retain many of the PC's version's best features. They aren't perfect; 60fps isn't a lock and bouts of tearing flare up in both - but Project Cars' ambition still vaults it ahead of most racers in the console space. And between the two, though many settings are matched Sony's platform is the easy pick due to its sturdier frame-rate and its native 1080p resolution.
It's something of a cliché to put PC in pole position, but in this case it needs extra emphasis. The higher grade particle effects, reflections and superior car models bring an obvious difference over what PS4 and Xbox One achieve. By comparison it's one of the starker contrasts next to current-gen releases - though the hardware needs to be there to back it. In an ideal scenario Project Cars requires a top-end Nvidia card slotted into an i7 PC, both of which give us a handle on high and ultra settings - upstaging PS4 and Xbox One on almost every visual point. However, there's scalability here too if you need it - using approximate console quality settings, we achieved similar performance to our stress tests with a Core i3 4130 and GTX 750 Ti, the components we chose for our budget PC build.
With plottings of a sequel already underway, Project Cars' console debut creates some eager expectations around the team's next step. We're intrigued to see what future patches bring to this release for example; whether PS4's ghosting issue will remain as-is, or if a toggle is a planned for the already exhaustive visual effects menu. Just as intriguing is the state of the Wii U version - an unusual third party pledge for the platform right now, though it's one we hope to see come to fruition, if only to see how much of the core experience remains intact for a game that exploits high-end hardware.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2015-project-cars-face-off
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