Just stumbled over this article, its a couple of months old already but still interesting. The F1 devs from Codemasters briefly talk about the next gen iteration of F1 2014 and whats possible with the increased hardware power.
One gaming rig per tire? Holy moly, looks like we are still quite far away from accurately simulating car racing for home use. I would have expected that real F1 simulators require a bit more than the usual home gaming PC, but 10 high power PC’s in total is pretty astonishing.
Guess Assetto Corsa and the likes now have to be considered sim-cade as well
It wont be as simple as pure gaming pc’s. I would hazard a guess that they are running 2 multi core cpu’s per rig on a duel socket motherboard, as much ram as they possibly can; and they definitely wont be running an off the shelf typical consumer GPU. I would say they have an Nvidia quadro GPU or two per system, not to mention I hardly doubt they will be running windows. They probably have a custom Linux OS, which means they will only have running what is necessary for the device drivers, physics, graphics, and telemetry data gathering.
I think they only said “Massive gaming PC’s” so they didn’t go over everyone’s heads. Not to mention a couple of those system will also be running the motion rigs they use, which are essential to driver training.
All this would be possible in your home today, assuming you won the Euro millions all to your self!
Yeah i don’t think they are using gaming pc’s per se, as graphics are certainly not top priority here, i’d even expect the graphics to be on FM3 level at best (as in the RB video you linked) . SLI Quadros seem to be likely as today’s high perfomance GPU’s can also effectively calculate non GFX stuff like physics, heck they even use them for bit-coin mining these days. The Quadro top models are about 20’000 USD each, but money is no object in this case i suppose.
However, i’m wondering how accurate their track surface data must be if they simulate the car physics to such a crazy level. That must go down to detailed characteristics of different tarmac patches on a certain track. Or is the main purpose to get reference points in regards to development of car parts and tires? Lets say if Pirelli develops a new tire, they feed the data into the simulator, run a few laps on always the same, rather neutral surface and then get an idea how the new part performs compared to the old one?
