Driveclub Latency “As Low As We Could Make It”
If you have followed our Gamescom 2014 Awards, you already know of our appreciation for Driveclub - after all, we awarded the game our Best Racing, Best Graphics and Best PS4 title prizes.
Some users have been upset for a while about Evolution Studios‘ choice to lock the game at 30FPS instead of 60, fearing that this will result in decreased responsiveness, which would be a significant downside for a racing game. After testing the game for two consecutive years at Gamescom 2013&2014 we noticed that this wasn’t the case and Driveclub latency seemed quite low; today Art Director Alex Perkins confirmed (in an interview with Eurogamer) the technical reason for this - as we had guessed, the actual simulation runs at a much higher update rate than the video refresh rate.
The update rate for how it comes into place, tyre to surface, suspension to car, is much quicker than the actual refresh rate.
The latency is as small as we could possibly make it. One of the things we [also] did when we were coming up with the PlayStation 4 itself was work heavily with the guys designing the controller, to make it much more responsive and much easier to use with driving games as well.
Hopefully that will allay this fear for everyone, once and for all. Another interesting tidbit from Perkins is that they collected all of the data on their own, instead of getting it from Polyphony Digital, which has been doing Gran Turismo for almost twenty years now.
No no, they work happily on their own, as do we. We collected all this data all ourselves. All the audio, all the vehicles. And as I say, it was a bespoke system we designed for doing all the material sampling. So it was pretty much all our own technology combined up in one big go.
Driveclub will be available only on PlayStation 4 starting from 7 October. If you’re still unsure about the game, you can always try the PlayStation Plus Edition, available for free to all PS+ subscribers; this will let you try one location (India), 11 tracks and 10 cars, although there’s no limit on game modes.