It aint iRacing in the proper hardcore organised racing department and nobody is saying it is, but it's also nowhere near as expensive as iRacing and can be played for completely free if you want. If you want the future of racing then Rfactor 2 and Assetto Corsa are the places to be with the most advanced physics. But sometimes the most advanced physics doesn't always mean the best racing games.
How do you measure that ("the most advanced physics")? What data do you have to support that?
Take a look at LFS. It sports a physical based tire model, it has been here for years, long before DK begun implementing his "physical tire model" (NNNTM...). And still, it has several serious problems, in spite of the sophistication of part of its physics (tire and suspensions).
rFactor 1/GTR2/Race07 all use the same platform (ISIMotor2) which has been praised for the tire, suspension and aero physics. To date, as far as I know and have been told, only NKP went a little beyond what was done with ISIMotor2, with several dynamic elements added to the tire. SMS did try to add up to the existing implementation they had of the ISI-based engine, but we all know what happened.
Now, just because a developer claims he has the "ultimate" tire model it doesn't necessarily follow from that that the other physics engines are outdated. There is an unbelievably high number of assumptions about the tire for these "next gen" TM's that RL tire engineers doubt apply at all to real tires - and lets not even talk about tire data, which is even more scarce for physical based models than for semi-empirical or empirical ones.
Dev claims are running a bit too high and, for some reason, their followers simply swallow it all without critical thinking.
Regarding GSC being a mod:
false. Guybo was told this a couple of times at NG and still insists in this.
Last interview I read on a Brazilian site complemented what Reiza's Renato S. has told a couple of times:
- GSC uses a new, updated version of ISIMotor2 (v1.6, we were told)
- as with SRW and SIMBIN's sims, some (a lot) work was done on the source code of ISIMotor2. We questioned ISI directly about some of the variables and parameters exposed on the physics files used by SIMBIN; their answer confirmed the above when they acknowledged they couldn't know what was used in the non-ISI sims.
I said it myself on the first page, Rfactor 2 is king in terms of physics, but it's still hit and miss depending on the content, the UI is pretty terrible and it lacks a matchmaking system like iRacing/SRW, the modding system is still not that great and causes headaches when you get mismatches, the graphics engine is decent but the official content is hit and miss, user made content often looks better than the official.
rF2 cannot be king of anything just yet. Work is ongoing, so things will improve, just as ISI will get more and better data from car manufacturers and the vehicle dynamics people will improve their calibration models.
The same applies to CARS, by the way, and to AC - all these sims have a long way to go until devs and fans are satisfied.
As for SRW:
from chatting with the support team and programmers, it is a bit clear the project is having a hard time. On top of that, programmers have to deal with what they call "legacy code" and, I suspect, they're not prepared to revamp it to the fullest (as Reiza has done).
