Project CARS 3 – VR Settings

Usable VR Settings

Scope

The intent of the guide is to provide usable settings for Project CARS VR users. The initial Project CARS 3 release VR performance was rather abysmal for a product advertised as having “best in class VR support.”

Codemasters did at least include VR support on day one for this product and is presumably committed to providing improvements and optimization to the VR implementation. I am encouraged by the Project Cars patch today 8/28/20 that did in fact fix the horrible menu stutter experienced by VR users and improved performance significantly.

I use an Oculus Rift CV1 so only have experience with it. I will experiment using the Steam VR implementation as well and provide feedback.

My Specs

I have the following PC specs so your miliage may vary:

• Ryzen 9 3950X
• 64 GB Ram
• RXt 2080 Super
• CV1 Oculus Rift

Settings

Can’t find them?! Yup that’s a feature! You have to complete the tutorial section using default settings before they show up. Don’t worry, eventually they will be on the Main menu bottom of screen at far right.

Performance Settings

I lowered some graphics settings from Ultra to High so I could use 1.5 Super Sampling in VR, which makes the picture look better to me. I’m still testing different settings, and I think Codemasters will make VR run better in future updates. All my performance testing was done during actual races with other cars on the track.

Setting SUPERSAMPLING here to OFF, LOW, and MEDIUM here results in 33.7 – 45 FPS as per OculusDebugTool once the actual race starts. There seems to be no difference between them, so perhaps the VR SUPERSAMPLING value is overriding this one anyway.

VR Settings

Hoping that Codemasters will continue to improve and optimize the VR performance. Currently these settings provide a clear image with minimal stutters during races with weather.

All things being equal using mostly HIGH settings and ANISOTROPIC 16X filtering here are some VR metrics:

• SUPERSAMPLING 2.0 28 FPS
• SUPERSAMPLING 1.7 36 FPS
• SUPERSAMPLING 1.5 45 FPS

So I currently have it set to 1.5 and can live with 45. Definitely NOT “Best in class” but maybe we give Codemasters thanks for implementing it from day one and hope they continue to improve.