Forza Motorsport 7: Demo Discussion

I've spent at least an hour trying to get the demo to run right. I can put it on medium settings and get ~20fps in benchmark. I think the handling problems I'm having with the cars are related to the fact that the game simply isn't running properly, and that the Porsche is just the most affected.

This isn't an isolated problem. There are a number of reports, both on the FM forums and elsewhere, of people with i5s/i7s and 1070s/1080s having stuttering, frame rate and performance problems.

This may be related to the fact that the game maxes Core 0. FH3 used to do this, and it caused a lot of problems for people (especially with higher end hardware) because there's only so much a single core can do. Eventually they patched it, but until then the best fix was to manually disallow affinity for Core 0. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to work here.



And more unfortunately, it's by design and T10 recommends setting the game to VSync 30 (which doesn't really help either, actually). So there's not even really much hope that they'll apply the FH3 fix to this in the near future.



Props to all of you for who it's running great and are having fun, but I can't justify spending money on a game that won't work. Especially one that seems to be not working for the same problems that they ran into with FH3. I worked through them with that game, and I'm glad that I did, but I'm not eager to go through that again.

At this rate, I may end up buying none of the big three racers releasing this year.

 

sebmugi is GT fan boy and cherry picking man
This screen shot is Very low settings

 

Ignoring the GT fanboy part, they definitely seem cherry picked. Even the player's car is low LOD on the last shot you quoted. I don't see the point of criticising model quality when you have it turned down, so here are some full detail shots at similar angles.

This is how the player's 911 GT2 looks:


And here's how the AI's GT3 RS really looks:



On PC max settings, the nearby AI cars are the equivalent of how the player's car looks on Xbox One.

 

It looks great, and I was afraid they would create solids like in the Rocket League
I buy RL Items and I love RL crates, I've seen some for sell
As for the Rocket League it is a good idea to buy Bodies and Nitro over the internet, I buy RL items and they are very cheap https://odealo.com/games/rocket-league

 

Can you imagine actively seeking out images to misrepresent one game just to make yourself feel better about your own chosen favourite?

 

I liked the demo, to be honest! A little surprised at how well the truck handled.

Although, to be absolutely frank, I think they could tone down the camera tilt. I got really disoriented when I started the GT2 race.

 

Another youtuber that shares the concerns many of us(most of us) have when it comes to Forza series/Forza 7(demo) and steering wheels.
Bah, what is wrong with turn10, just make the wheel work as a steering wheel, not a pad with longer "throw"...

 

On the other hand my ignore list has grown since Tuesday, that means the average IQ of the posts I see goes up.

 

That's fanboyism for you. Now can you stop being faster than me ? In the last FM, I had to hot laps for days to pass you on the leaderboard. Hopefully you got slower over the years :-)

 

lol, I think my competitive days are behind me, gone are the days of being top 10 overall in C class, my favourite class! I'm getting old and not sure I have the same amount of time I used to dedicate to my racing games. Although with the big three releasing close together my competitive juices are beginning to flow. Hopefully see you on the track

 

For me at least the feel with a controller comes down to 2 main areas.

First, how the game interprets my inputs, most racing games usually have settings that allow you to change this with options like steering sensitivity and linearity. I started playing PCARS 2 last night and the default controller options didn't work for me, when I made an input I wasn't really sure what the car would do which made driving at any reasonable speed almost impossible, I changed the settings based on their descriptions and immediately I could place the car much more confidently. Different people will have different preferences much like they can have different styles of input, some people like to tap the stick, I prefer to make small precise movements, and this may also change depending on what kind of cars they prefer driving. I've yet to find a game this generation where I can't make the car on screen respond to my controller inputs as I expect, if the game isn't already great out of the box then so far I've had no problems finding comfortable settings myself.

The second part is IMO where some games are a lot better than others and that is the feedback through the controller, much like you can get FFB from a wheel which may help you find the limit of grip, we get vibrations through the controller, I'll just add here that the XB1 controller is great for this with the rumble triggers. When I have played games with a wheel I can usually tell when the car is oversteering/understeering based on the FFB and change my input accordingly, on a controller I get vibrations which help me decide how to adapt my inputs. With the XB1 controller and the rumble triggers I can also get vibrations which tell me I'm on the limit of grip when accelerating/braking, this can help people who use no TCS or ABS a huge amount.

I haven't played the Forza 7 demo yet, but from the games I've played Forza 5/6 > PCARS 1/2, Dirt Rally, > WRC 5/6, Assetto Corsa when it comes to vibration feedback. I've tried playing FM6 with no vibration and my race pace drops by 2+ seconds because I have no confidence accelerating or braking and get caught by surprise sometimes when the car oversteers as I'm used to having that kind of feel through the controller, however I can play with no sound without it massively affecting my race pace. With Assetto Corsa there isn't as much feedback through the controller so I find myself relying on sound and visual feedback a lot more than other games, which I at least find more difficult to react quickly to and therefore have a slightly harder time keeping the car facing the right way.

I'm curious now if anyone uses no vibration when playing racing games, and if so how their performance is affected by having no sound?

TL;DR - 1) How the game interprets inputs and applies them to the car. 2) The vibration you feel in the controller can be very helpful.

 

I can play pretty well without vibrations, it might even help me.
Sound, on the other hand, is a must have for me. If I really focus I can do "alright" but for the most part, I completely suck without sound.

 

A lot of data is raw stats, curb weight, horsepower/torque to the wheels, balance, and on and on.

Fiddling is always involved, physics engine not properly working with 30s GP? You have to implement frame manipulation that affects the driving dynamics quite a bit in those old race cars.

There is no such thing as a perfect physics engine and anyone claiming such a thing is laughable.

 

The physics "engine" shouldn't be changed (and isn't) from car to car. That would simply take far too much data and space for current hardware.
The parameters for each car are what may or may not need adjusted.

Much like real life, physics don't change from car to car, the car and it's physical dimensions change.

 

Exactly who said that it changes car from car?

I said that if they add a new type of car it could require expansion and advancement of the engine to replicate how it works in real life better.

Frame flex is extremely important to how a 30s GP car handles on a track but not so much for a more modern vehicle.

I never once stated that the cars are treated differently by the physics engine.

Turn 10 themselves have publicly stated that they do not program 0-60 times or any other performance metric into Forza, they input all the raw data on the specifications of the vehicle into the engine and the cars are usually spot on with their real life counterparts performance.

In certain instances this isn't true due to limitations of the engine(frame flex) that are added for all vehicles but only effect cars that are effected in a noticeable way in real life.

Physics engines are constantly evolving.

 

I didn't say that you did, I wasn't quite sure which you were saying.
So I said what they do, that's all.

 

I drive without assists and when the batteries are low and the vibration is gone then i can´t drive a single corner ^^

 

How did you cope before vibration was a thing?

 

I never had a pad without. But the thing is that only Forza games offer feedback on pad for tire slip.

 

So how do you play every other game with a pad?

 

A lot of data is data. "Stats" is a term improperly used for the Top Trumps figures of a car (horsepower, torque, curb weight, top speed & acceleration, etc.). And if you look at it that way, everything about a car can be expressed in "stats", from the configuration of the suspension to the weight balancement to the stiffness of the chassis.

...then you fix your physics engine.

There is definitely such a thing as reasonably accurate physics engines. They're used everyday for countless purposes (from scientifics pursuits, to design & engineering, to digital forensics, to actually making cars work). And there is such a thing as physics engines that can reasonably represent in real time the behavior of the kind of vehicles presented in Forza Motorsport without the developers having to give the game different engines for different cars.

But at this point I feel like we may be saying something very similar, and... Arguing semantics more than anything else.

 

I had no issues with the demo, i7 4790k and with only one of my gtx970 cards spooling gpu usage, both spool memory. I will admit I couldn't run everything on high, I bumped it down to medium, which still looks great. The benchmark I could run high but in a race I couldn't.

 

I also play without assists (except for abs on all the road cars that have it)
I turned vibration off last night to check it out, I don't think I will be turning it back on. (Extra battery life)
The brakes in Forza games aren't progressive enough for me to drive without ABS well, regardless of vibration.
Forza might be the only game I need abs to drive really well in, too.

Edit: I forgot, at least in FM 5 and 6 with the wheel and pedals braking without abs was fantastic, it was another game that didn't give good brake feel, I'm not sure which, maybe FH3. I haven't had the wheel out much lately, just FH3 with the controller.

 

The wccftech article you quoted has been updated.

So it sounds to me like it's not intentional and there is a chance of the game being fixed via a patch like Horizon.

 

Hello,
Check my first race in Forza Motorsport 7 Demo on 4K Gaming PC (i7 6700k + GTX1070 + Thrustmaster wheel).

The demo is too short but the fisrt impressions are : Beautiful grafics (cars, circuit and weather).
Next week will be so long !

 

Boring saturday evening with some beer and this is the result ^^


Forza Motorsport 7 Demo | Weather Transition Timelapse @ Nürburgring GP

 

Sounds like it to me. Also remember the demo was the E3 demo which was pushed out and done in probably May, so 5 months more of work has been done to get it wrapped up nicely.

 

Interesting.

However, Chris Tector is fighting a strawman there. No one claimed it was limited to running on only one core. Both FH3 and the FM7 clearly use multiple cores and always have. The problem with FH3 (and what seems to be happening with FM7 demo) was that what seemed to be happening was that some calculationally hefty physics and graphics systems were all being forced onto Core 0. To the point that even with low settings and relatively untaxing game states the core would be pegged at 100%, making the OS try and shuffle priorities and generally causing stutter and lag.

In FH3, you could disable Core 0 and the game would intelligently redistribute the tasks that it had designated for Core 0 among the remaining cores, resulting in a much more stable experience. FM7 demo doesn't seem to do this.

It's sort of assumed that this design is a hold over of creating a game that has to run on the Xbox 1. After all, the X1 doesn't have anything like the GPU power of most gaming computers, so it makes sense to offload as much of the graphical workload to the CPU as possible. But presumably on X1 they're very careful what they assign to each core so that they make sure they're getting the most bang for their buck. They know they have essentially 7 cores to work with and they know what those cores are capable of. They can make sure that the most taxing or sensitive tasks get their own core and have plenty of spare overhead.

That's not the case on PC, people can have anywhere from 2 to a buttload of cores with a fairly wide range of speeds and instruction sets. Not to mention the general difference in CPU to GPU power on PCs. So the game has to be able to divvy itself up sensibly to make use of the hardware that it's running on, and in some cases (like mine) it appears unable to do so.

I hope they fix it, but I'm not holding my breath. It took a long, long time for them to even acknowledge it as an issue in FH3.

 

Two Hotlaps:

 

Played it.

Yay Mugello.
Boo Dubai.