360hz physics? Was it a lie up to now? Is it a lie now?

I was very surprised by a particular revelation in the recent Top Gear interview with Dan Greenawalt and Chris Esaki. Apparently FM7’s physics polling rate, if I understand the article correctly, is only 60hz as opposed to 360hz for FM’23.

https://www.topgear.com/car-news/gaming/will-be-last-forza-motorsport-ever

I found that to be extremely surprising because I remember FM2 having 360hz physics as well, at least according to the marketing material and reviews at the time. As an example you can see it mentioned in this IGN review from the period.

https://www.ign.com/articles/2008/09/30/forza-motorsport-2-review

This leads me to obvious question; when did the Forza Motorsport series move AWAY from 360hz physics and why? Alternatively, was it ever actually a 360hz sample rate as suggested? If it wasn’t ACTUALLY true before, why should I believe it is now?

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Interesting catch you did there.

Maybe when games ran in more than 720p it had to lower, but still strange way to go all the way down to 60 Hz.

It’s 9 times the pixels for 4k.

My former daw computer from 2010 retired this year and got a new one with about 6 times higher benchmarking. But series X only is 4 times estimated higher than cpu I had then.

From Wiki for 360
" While most games are rendered natively at 720p, the video from all games can be scaled by the hardware to whatever resolution the user has set in the console’s settings; from 480i NTSC and 576i PAL all the way to 1080p HDTV."

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That’s interesting because a 360hz polling rate is the math behind “48 times the simulation power” that was touted pre-release.

The claim is that Forza Motorsport went from 1 point per tyre at 60hz (Forza Motorsport 7), to 8 points per tyre at 360hz.

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With some more digging forza motorsport 2 did have some parts of its physics data running at 360hz, but the tire physics were at 60hz. Apparently Colin Mcrae Dirts physics were at 1000hz at the time.

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I would like to know the FFB refresh rate to.
In ACC the FFB frequency is adjustable with default at 333Hz

ACC physics refresh rate is 400Hz btw.

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Where did you find that, out of curiosity? I’d be interested to read more about why all of sim racing doesn’t look more like BeamNG in terms of how the cars are simulated by now. I used to think that was all a matter of compromises made to obtain car licenses from manufacturers, but there are definitely games getting away with pretty complete destruction of licensed cars these days from what I’ve seen.

Also, which Colin McRae game went that hard with physics and on what system?

That’s an excellent point, now that you mention it. I wonder if wheel FFB is part of what motivated them to bump up the polling rate for FM’23. That would make sense to me anyway.

I mean, FFB is gonna function like sound insofar as the higher your sample rate, the greater potential to capture more minor details. I’m curious to know what the human sampling rate for touch is now. Based on what sim racing game developers and FFB wheel makers are telling us, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was right around 360hz.

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There was an interview with Dan Greenawalt talking about it ill try to find it.

This link doesnt offer more info but it actually includes fm2 and dirt

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I would assume it would be around there. Even though its not great out of the box it has improved from the past. It definitely feels like theres less of a delay compared to 7.

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I don’t know what to think, because I don’t have the ability to test the update rate of the physics engine. All I know is, to me this is the best feeling Forza Motorsport title by a large margin. If they were telling a lie about how fast the physics engine updates, then they still managed to make the game feel great.

Oh well…

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Unfortunately, I can’t either. Too bad there’s no Digital Foundry for physics engines.

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I have the same feeling about this game,it’s the best driving Forza to date.It just desperately needs more tracks.

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