The major 1.8 update for Assetto Corsa Competitzione is finally heading to ninth-generation consoles later this month, almost a year on from its appearance on PC versions of the game.
Scheduled for September 29 — just meeting 505 Games’ promise to have the update out by the end of September — the 1.8 update is a quite literal game-changer.
When it arrived in November 2021 on PC, it brought along a raft of changes both in the UI and under the hood too, and it’s taken Kunos Simulazioni’s development partner Untold Games a while to port the changes over to the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles.
Probably the most important aspect of the update is a complete overhaul of the game’s tire model and physics simulation, with the physics refresh rate upped to 400Hz from 333Hz. That means the game now updates all the various component and surface interactions once every 2.5ms rather than every 3ms.
The tire model gains new calculations for core temperature, flash temperature on the surface, heat generation under “extreme” conditions, and heating across the tire relative to camber. There’s new tire flex simulation and even a new model for tire friction.
Along with a UI overhaul, a major playability feature for ACC 1.8 was Open Season. This merged all of the game content into a sandbox mode, allowing players to race any kind of grid, including a multiclass mixing slider to set the number of cars from each group, at any tracks they choose.
One thing we’re not sure about in the update at the moment is AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) support. This was a part of the PC update — alongside Nvidia’s similar DLSS — and both PS5 and Xbox consoles support FSR, but we’ll have to wait for the patch notes to see.
The post-1.8 update DLC brought to PC — consisting of the Challengers Pack in March 2022 and the Land of the Free DLC in June 2022 — should also be coming to the ninth-gen consoles in due course.
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