A new era of RaceRoom Racing Experience is nearly upon us, with the biggest update of the year for the PC racing sim set to release next week, September 24.
This past July, KW Studios announced the ‘Summer Campaign’, a three-part series of events that began with an extensive free-to-play period in July, giving players an all-access pass to the game’s library of over 250 cars and 168 racing venues, including all variations. Following that was the summer sale where bargain-hunting sim racers could snatch up their favorite cars and tracks for up to 50% off.
That brings us to the third and final phase of the series, billed as the beginning of a “new era” for R3E. We first learned of the update (and some of its content) back in July, but now with it within reach, KW Studios has pulled the curtain back — revealing that the update will bring four all-new vehicles and an extensive graphical overhaul.
As you’ve no doubt been able to tell by now, three of the four vehicles coming to RaceRoom are top-category Le Mans LMDh cars: the BMW M Hybrid V8, Lamborghini SC63, and Porsche 963. The latter is the newest reveal and brings with it quite the prestige.
Weighing in at 1,030kg (2,270 lb), the 963 is brought to life with a 4.6-liter, twin-turbocharged V8 engine and the same rear-mounted Bosch MGU — a spec component in the LMDh class — sending a combined maximum 671hp to all four wheels.
A multiple race and championship-winning chassis, and currently leading both championships in the IMSA series, the 963 will be no slouch around the many venues RaceRoom has to offer.
The fourth and final machine expands the British Touring Car Championship (BTCC) lineup with the inclusion of the Renault Laguna Supertourer. Powered by a 2-liter, inline-4 engine sending 280hp to the front wheels and weighing in at 950kg (2,094 lb), the Laguna is yet another car set in its winning ways.
This Laguna utterly dominated the 1997 BTCC season, winning 14 of the 24 races in the calendar, securing the Williams-Renault team both the BTCC Constructors’ and Drivers’ Championships in only its fourth year of competition.
Beyond that, also included in the update is an overhaul to the game’s visuals. The day the update goes live, players can expect more realistic lighting, physics-based rendering, improved reflections, and performance optimizations across the board. The latter is especially interesting given the fact R3E is already a well-optimized title.
For those worried of needing to upgrade their hardware to enjoy the new update to its fullest, fear not. Thomas Jansen, a developer at KW Studios, laid any possible concerns to rest with a performance overview on the official forums for R3E.
Jansen notes that the first thing the team found were performance gains on the CPU side of things. The game’s engine is known to be CPU-bottlenecked, especially when many cars are visible at once. With this update, that should no longer prove to be an issue as the uplift, even with CPU-bound, is upwards of 50-60% compared to the current iteration of the game.
While the increase in fidelity won’t be free, as expected, it’s estimated that the performance loss will be less than 20%. As a worst-case scenario example, Jansen uses the Steam Deck and in a test scenario on the Nordschleife 24h layout with 20 cars visible and at max settings, with 8x MSAA, ultra shadows, and the game’s new 100% reflection refresh rate setting, it still managed to stay above 30fps.
With a few tweaks to some of the more demanding settings, that number would naturally go up. Even better, on a higher end system with a Ryzen 7 5800X3D and GeForce RTX 3080, performance numbers are still around 100fps while in cockpit view in the same test environment albeit this time at 4K with 8x SSAA.
Supersampling Anti-Aliasing (SSAA) is one of the, if not the, most demanding forms of AA as it’s effectively rendering the game in a higher resolution (in this case, the game was running at 32K!) and then downsampled back to the base resolution. Dropping the SSAA sampling rate from 8x to 4x by itself would be a huge net gain in performance, so do keep that in mind.
The update is definitely enticing and is something we’ll check out for ourselves next week, but as ever, we’ll keep an eye out for more as it develops, so stay tuned to GTPlanet!
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