Deep Dive Into iRacing's 2024 Graphic Settings | Part 1: Anti-Aliasing and Shadows

[@nathancad]

I put the MMSA samples to zero for sports track racing and it was horrible, the lines on the side of the road become pixelated and triangled and it appeared to be rendering as I drove, causing the corners to be unclear. It was hard to judge the corners and apexes. I changed them back to x4 quick smart. It may not affect oval racing as much, as you do not need to concentrate on braking for corners. Also be aware that if you change the compressing, iracing will reset you screen parameters, viewing distance and also your iracing graphics setting to default and you will have to put them in again, so it may be good to take note of what they are before you change it. Would have been good if you mentioned this in the vid, as it took a lot of troubleshooting for me to correct again. In the end, I just resorted to my original settings and was down about an hour of my time from messing around. I really should have just left it how it was in the first place with the setting from your last video a year ago, that video helped me more for mu situation. This video was not an improvement for my PC. The old saying, if its not broken, dont try and fix it. haha

[@ketohiker7040]

Quality work, appreciate how much work has gone into this. Very timely too, suffered from the issue you mentioned, my i913 getting a lot more than 'toasty' with the MSI settings as supplied. PC kept crashing, updated the BIOS with the latest MSI download and now have performance issues in game. 4080 Aero VR. So big thanks for this, will work through the suggestions and look forward to Pt2. Cheers.

[@DannyGiusa]

Insane amount of work behind this, thank you very much for putting this together!

[@sachanorden19]

He actually has video’s from years ago on this exact topic, the amount of expertise and dedication. My gosh you truely are one of the most useful content creators I’ve come across! Thank you.

[@arvidurs]

Now we need an updated one, with the combined settings

[@ClaytonMacleod]

Compressed textures are for low graphics memory systems to help everything fit in memory. That’s not applicable to a 4090. iRacing can’t even come close to using up a 4090’s RAM. Compressing textures when that’s the case is pointless. Shadows aren’t geometry. Antialiasing smooths out geometry. Shadows are generated in a manner that does not involve MSAA, so naturally MSAA is not going to affect the quality of shadow edges. It works fine for what it is actually used for. It isn’t used for shadows. It is used on the polygon edges of all the objects. If you want to see what the difference is in the easiest way possible, load up that same track you had loaded for your shadow MSAA discussion and look at the light posts behind the grandstands. Those objects alias like crazy, and you should readily see the difference between the different levels of MSAA with those. Those are objects made up of polygons. That’s what MSAA operates on, polygons, specifically their edges. This costs fillrate, which means it will be a greater cost to performance on slower cards that are starved for fillrate while trying to render higher resolutions. Basically it is increasing resolution for specific portions of polygons, and it should be obvious that rendering a higher resolution takes more horsepower. FXAA and SMAA are shader programs that smear the pixels. They suck and should be off. They take the finished image and smear it, they just smear it in different ways. If you want *actual* antialiasing then you want to use the MSAA setting and that will actually do antialiasing on the geometry during rendering, rather than smearing Vaseline on the camera. A handful of the different effects are accomplished via shaders. Shader programs, due to their nature and how they’re processed, tend to share costs. Multiple shaders can run at the same time while not changing the overall cost very much, and this is why you may or may not see very much change in overall performance when turning one shader effect on or off. The shader effects are all listed on the lower right of that settings page. Motion blur, antialiasing, SSR, sharpening, distortion, DOF effect, heat haze, HDR, SSAO, replay render modes. All those are done with shader programs. They do have different costs for each one, but with how shaders run it isn’t actually a simple addition or subtraction of a given amount of performance. They share processing resources to some extent, and so turning one or two off or on isn’t going to change the cost by a given amount. This will vary from card to card because different cards have a different number of cores that can process shader programs. The cost for a given scenario on a 4090 isn’t going to be the same for that same scenario on a 3070 because they have a different number of hardware units for running shader programs. Shaders start costing more when you start running low on available units to run the programs, so a 3070 is going to start choking on shaders sooner than a 4090 will. And benchmarking on that 3070 is going to return very different results when comparing shaders on/off because of that.

[@1nfinitum]

You put a lot of work into this, but that is one massive misunderstanding of what MSAA does. MSAA is sub-pixel sampling that improves the jaggedness of high contrast transitions in the image, it has nothing to do with shadows. The reason performance changes two fold from 8x to 4x is because the GPU is by definition doing almost half the work in rendering the image. 8x is still not a reasonable setting to be on, but 4x or 2x are absolutely a good choice especially if you are on a 1080p or 1440p display. You might not have noticed any change going from 8x to 0x since you had SMAA enabled in the other anti-aliasing section.

[@1nfinitum]

You are also misunderstanding the concept of bottlenecking. Graphics rendering has almost nothing to do with the CPU, you're not bottlenecking your CPU by running your graphics card harder. Your graphics card will do all the work that you throw at it until there is no more work to do; this means that if you set your graphics to low in iRacing, your GPU will continue to render frames well past the refresh rate of your monitor. This isn't inherently bad, but it is extra work that the GPU is doing that it doesn't need to be. That's what the FPS limiter and VSync settings are for in iRacing. They help you throttle the performance of your graphics card to prevent it from constantly overworking to render frames when it's not necessary. You absolutely can be bottlenecked by your CPU, but I guarantee that is not the case with a 13900K unless you're trying to hit a frame rate target of 240. A better term for what you are experiencing is having your frame rate be CPU limited. In other words, your frame rate will not go any higher because your CPU is working at 100% calculating the engine, physics, and all other iracing subsystems while the GPU sits idle because it has to wait for the CPU to be done before it can render the next frame to screen. There is no mysterious performance loss when using low graphical settings with a high end graphics card, if anything you're prolonging the life of your card by spinning the fan less and heat cycling the GPU die less excessively, but that is generally not a very strong concern.

[@madbull4666]

@@1nfinitum Exactly, most sim titles whether thats racing or flight has a lot of calculations behind it due to all the phyisics needed to be calculated which is all done on a cpu. Going above 150fps or so is very difficult for most sims due to the cpu. Also talking about his custom loop and how much he has overclocked it I can pretty much say that will gain you 5-10 fps at an extreme end which is also when everything is optimised for those speeds too, sometimes an overclock is steady but is slower than standard depending on how stable it is. Setting low/off MSAA shows a massive difference, it goes from very ugly to only slightly ugly. I do have mine set to 8x as I really do notice a difference, or at least I did as I haven't tried it for a while.

[@TharesYT]

Is SMAA better or MSAA ? What should I during ? Or activate both ? I have a 4090 gtx

[@regibson23]

I'm baffled that you know so much about graphics settings but your videos are all jittery despite being 60fps.

[@VMeed-jo7fb]

I’m baffled as to why someone would criticize a video that took HOURS of testing and preparation. The answer to your question is pretty obvious, he’s running Iracing, an FPS analyzer program and a video capture program all at the same time.

[@brummiesimracer]

Yeah I'm also prettt baffled as to your critical post when this guy is giving us a tonne of information and has spent countless hours to help people improve their FPS.....my suggestion is to say something positive or just simply shut your mouth 👍

[@TerriblyRacing]

@@VMeed-jo7fbno not at all, even the intro has awful frames drops/stutters

[@RRgaming2322]

Strange I’m not seeing any of that

[@TerriblyRacing]

@@RRgaming2322the talking section in the intro you can see it looks about 20 fps it’s super jittery

[@williamstump7036]

Soooo stuck …. I’m on a Samsung G9 , RTX 4060, Intel i5 14600kf. I can’t seem to get above 70-80 FPS. I e been through numerous videos and can’t seem to bump them up. Any suggestions?

[@MIKEDRIFT]

A screen shot of the final settings at the end of you video would have been awesome and the next video you made .

[@vividpsychosis8222]

Did you do all these tests using replay????? You keep changing the replay graphics not in game graphics tabs….

[@Swanthered]

Thanks for all this info and testing! These are good numbers to see! However, I wanted to take a second to correct something I believe might be inaccurate in your understanding, specifically, a bit of a misunderstanding of what exactly it is that Anti-Aliasing is doing for the render. In short, it's not related to the shadows at all, which you mentioned and gestured to a few times when talking about it. In regards to games, it's almost exclusively going to be related to the edges of the objects themselves to help them appear smooth. Which is to say, this does not tie into the cast shadows or shadow maps. It COULD have a small effect on how they're perceived as the filter is applied, but in iRacings case, as I'll explain a little of below, the shadow resolution is low/bad enough that you're not going to really see much happening there, you'll primarily see it on the edges of objects on a very small, only a few pixels like 1-3, level whereas those shadows are extending across 20px-100px depending on resolution. In my case for example, if my AA is below 4x, I can see the edges of curbs where they connect to the road in particular as well as handrails etc. show kind of a "shimmer" as I move along the track. This happens because the edges get kind of a stair step effect with out AA, especially on lower resolution. So though it's expensive, I pay the cost because I hate that shimmer. The value of AA is also resolution dependent, so for higher res screens it might be much less necessary than lower res screens. Additionally, when changing between FXAA and SMAA, if you already have AA off, I'm not entirely sure that there will be any effect, specifically because AA is already off, so there's no processes happening in either case. Can't remember if you had AA on or at 2/4/etc or not when messing with that setting. A more thorough explanation can be found here - kzbin.info/www/bejne/nJnRnqpqbK1jkKc In regards to the Jaggies on shadows in iRacing, I'm not entirely sure the specifics here, but I believe this is a short coming of their engine and the rendering tech. A great example you can probably see, if you take a flat colored car into the paint room, and just start moving around, you'll essentially see stripes across surfaces. This gets a bit into tech I'm not entirely familiar with, but what I believe is happening there is essentially the lighting having an iteration over distance, which is would KIND of work like a resolution in its own way. In some cases, you can see this type of visual can be found due to low resolution shadow maps, however, shadow maps are not used on dynamic shadows as we'd see on the cars and such. To say a little about that, cast shadows are still pretty expensive when it comes to creating a render, but you can see how far we have come in more modern games when we have settings/tech that allow an objects shadow to blur the farther away it gets from its source, vs iRacing's striped artifacts. jagged edges and lightly blury edges, causeit's a much older title, obviously. But, all that to say, I believe that's an artifact of iRacing's lighting specifically, but at the very least, it is not tied to AA when it comes to shadows. Hope all that's of some value, thanks again for taking the time to put all this together for folks!

[@manic_miner]

Shadow resolution defines the crispness of shadows, not the AA value. In iRacing, that's the StaticShadowRes and the DynamicShadowRes lines in the .ini file. Set DynamicShadowRes=4 for cockpit textures with no bluriness..

[@hippieflip8893]

Ever since the load bar went away, that’s when the jagged edges around the wall came back and temperatures were way lower for my gpu.

[@derpsn]

Just wondering how good the metrics are on the new road tracks. Also have you done some benchmarks for example on okayama with folliage on? I'm just curious because I think these settings may work okish for oval, but on street you will have great difficulty to have good FPS numbers.

[@jassonco]

Wizard! I also had been struggling with the stutters and I too have a high end system. Amazing work!!!

[@johnsheehan3671]

Have you made any changes within the NVidia control panel since last time?

[@ludocattin2788]

Do you have intel 13th or 14th generation as CPU ? Intel told that the CPU could have issues, too much voltage. It can create crash on games, sluttering and a lot of other symptoms. Intel provided a BIOS update on 15th August to solve this issue. But if your CPU is already damaged, it won't help at all.

[@JCrowe86]

iRacing has it's own shadow resolution setting in the .ini file which could be why you don't see much change there when you mess with the AA settings. I do see a fairly noticeable difference in the turn 1 wall jaggedness when you go from a higher AA number to 0, although even with higher AA it's still pretty ugly. Guess it just depends on if you think that small improvement is worth it for the performance hit.

[@pierre-jeanlow5219]

same here at 4:27 you can remove the aliasing tuning the DynamicShadowRes from 1 to 3 for exemple just give a try and let me know

[@menace992]

Shadow map quality can be quite dependent on PCF filtering to remove jaggedness.

[@OnTheGrid]

Fantastic video. Thank you for taking the time.

[@OSRNetwork2016]

Also what mic are you using, thanks...

[@BigAlKing99]

Why do you change the " Replay" tab settings instead of the "Graphics" tab? I would think the "Graphics" tab is what changes the in-game graphics.

[@JCrowe86]

iRacing uses 2 different settings. If you are actually in the car driving then it's using graphic settings. If you're just watching then it's using replay settings. There are a few that carry over but most are separate. It's good this way as some want better graphics for photo/video and broadcasting while not caring about getting above 60fps like they would if they were actually racing.

[@anticalgary]

What is that dash overlay you use with the white gauges

[@-Ola-.]

Dont agree at all mate.. MSAA at 0 looks like shit on railings , fences and tracklines.. And SSAO and SMAA are heavy on FPS on my 13900/4090 triple 1440p setup. MSAA 4x and SSAO/SMAA off is way better for me.

[@GlennCorbet]

Same for me.

[@Horarik]

Do you use FXAA instead or just set to "Off"?

[@-Ola-.]

@@Horarik no, i find FXAA looking worse on than off.

[@M43S7RO]

Would be good to see what impact these changes have on tracks like Spa with much more complex objects (foliage) to render.

[@MIKEDRIFT]

I came from gt7 to I racing recently... and I got to say this graphics setting up is a nightmare. Tried rain masters 1st lap it just cut out . Is there any chance at the end of this series when you have all your veiws etc you could put still pictures of the setting we need to change? Because it will take a lifetime to scroll through your videos that I do appreciate thank you.

[@TommyBrandon]

Video 2 covers that. And it's out tomorrow

[@chrisracing81]

Not that hard to setup, good advices in official forums. On PC you will need to do some work for best settings in every game - not only iRacing.

[@nathancad]

If your PC is cutting out or crashing from Iracing, Id say it would be a hardware issue on your PC bro. It used to happen to me until I bought a stronger graphics card and processor. Or it may be as simple as you don't have enough RAM which is a cheap fix. Do you run triples or just single screen?

[@sirgriffinman]

It can even be hardware instability like memory/ram issues. If they have their system overclocked it could be a bad overclock they didn't know they had. ​@@nathancad

[@ryanvaupel9871]

Hi great content. Thank you. On my performance settings the option to turn “Dynamic Objs” on is set to off and it’s greyed out, meaning I can’t change it. Any ideas?

[@blade7658]

Shader Quality has to be High or Ultra to enable Dynamic Objs.

[@BorisAngel_]

Do you use LOD? On another note, I thought that anti aliasing only applied when coupled with FSR.

[@TommyBrandon]

Graphics tab is when u are racing. I cant do a controlled benchmark in a race due to too many variables. Everything shown was tested in a race to confirm

[@willracer1jz]

Thank you for the video I'm going to try your settings on VR see if they help.

[@joaomoretto]

your content and the way you present is always great!! I am intrigued by MSAA samples. when I put it to 0x, the game becomes horrible for road tracks... jagged lines, etc. muuuuuuuuch worse than 8x or 4x. FPS was way better with 0x for sure, but the image was completely different. Not sure why for you the images are identical... I have an i9 13900k, RTX 4070super, 32GB ram, triple 2k monitors.

[@Kreid_OG]

yeah something is off, he should retest that because at 0 it looks horrendous

[@MrRxc94]

new sub here, good job man!

[@bsbru88]

I race in VR. My VR while racing will drop to lik99999999999. Will this work for that too! Getting sick of having to back out of ofiicials and killing mypffl

[@markcrooks1631]

Nice work!

[@sincity_steve]

MSAA actually works for VR, so this is where it would be beneficial.

[@seanmack4552]

Pretty sure there is a shadow resolution setting in the Ini folder mate, it helps shadow jaggies.

[@coreymoore01]

I’m completely computer illiterate - these videos help a ton though and iRacing kinda forces you to learn it. Does it matter what gpu i have? I have a 3060 vs your 4090.. I don’t have many issues other than a little bit of stuttering but not bad at all.

[@TommyBrandon]

With your GPU. Look at the AA and shadows. Test that. A 3060 is still a very good card

[@coreymoore01]

@@TommyBrandon thanks dude!

[@zeahroela]

Appreciate your effort but you are totally mistaken on the AA samples try with lower resolution settings and you see the major difference!

[@travislohneis224]

I have been having issues with iracing crashing in the middle of a race it just freezes and kicks me out I dunno what’s going on but it’s frustrating

[@johnsheehan3671]

check the IR forum, iracing is aware of this, I've had these issues a few times since last week, fortunately not during a race but after a qual or before a race session, I missed a couple starts because I had to reboot

[@yukaweed]

could be a GPU or CPU overheat. What GPU do you have and at what resolution are you playing?

[@timothysmart6081]

I will work on that tonight

[@robloyst4514]

Man. I’d like to see you use nvidia profile inspector! More options.

[@Baltuc_Racing]

holy heck . i was getting 70-90fps and just by copying you (vid 1&2) i got 150fps and a muuuuuuch smoother and beautiful qali. thx ❤ ( 3080ti & ryzen 5800x3d)

[@royrom86]

Thanks so much!!!

[@ogpeekhal]

drinking game, drink everytime buddy says "OK?"

[@whitedragonracing]

They have raised the medium settings, with a 1080ti im pretty stumped on pushing higher, lost 50 fps due to there changes to make rain work. 😂

[@Panterluca]

I think you need a contact frame for your cpu or your custom water loop is terrible, I could run 5.6ghz all core on p cores on my 13900k with a 360mm aio and temps in iracing wouldn’t go above 70° c on my 14900k it runs 5.7ghz all core and 4.4 on the e-cores and still temps are below 70°

[@W.Eric.Anderson]

Nice work...thanks

[@PazLeBon]

idont lower the graphics cos of the fps, more cos of the latency

[@Boulanger768]

MSAA Off on my machine, the wall looked horrible...Back to 4X

[@skinny5181]

Interesting stuff - strange that iRsidekick seems to very much disagree with the compressed textures "Since 2023 Q4 iRacing is using a lot of VRAM on new tracks, it is essential to compress all textures to avoid blurry graphics" Gonna give it a try anyway :)

[@ZoneXV]

Don't bother trying to prove the iRsidekick guy wrong, aka Martin Lanza. Dude has a seriously complex where he can't be wrong. He thinks just because iRacing allocates a certain amount of VRAM if you let it, that is how much it needs. That is why even though iRacing might allocate 8GB of VRAM if you let it, you can limit it to 6gb with the same scenario and not run into blurry textures. I went through and did A/B testing, showing how much VRAM was utilized, and how little difference the compression made with the numbers and he still acted like he was right. If you have a GPU with 10GB or more VRAM you should ALWAYS have compression turned off, with 8GB I still would turn it off. The biggest difference I could get in VRAM usage between compressed vs uncompressed was 700mb. Even with that, iRacing does a pretty good job of swapping in mip levels for textures at shorter and closer distances.

[@StartsWithALetter]

@@ZoneXV 👈🏻🤡 says the guy who the only thing you’re good at is going in circles with a whopping 600 other idiots that think they can race a real car competitively 🤣 your irating confirms it, not me.

[@wiplashxd9178]

It's wired people have problems with iracing. Cause I have a average pc with no problems in my opinion. I run a i5-10400f cpu, with a ASRock Radeon 6600xt. And got the 49 inch odyssey g9 neo monitor and I run around 120fps to 160fps depending on the track and how many people. I do get only 90 to about 130 fps with rain. But I hate the rain and don't race it. I could if I needed to. Look it ain't 300fps but it works just fine for me on every game I've played iracing, LMU, Warzone, BeamNG, Apex, ATS, ect. Will be trying to uncompress the paint files though. Thanks for the info in these videos.

[@MrJM900]

I have the same CPU, and i have problems with stuttering. My GPU it's a RX 6700 XT. Do you reccomend any settings to solve my problem?

[@OSRNetwork2016]

Do a lot of these work the same for replay...as that is what I use for broadcasting...thanks..

[@TommyBrandon]

Yes

[@Kreid_OG]

So you got a powerful computer, got it.

[@TalkieT]

MSAA has a very obvious effect. You need to look at model edges not shadow edges.

[@Prickles2001]

That's what I was thinking. Is SMAA (bottom right) another AA alternative? Could him running SMAA be affecting his MSAA testing?

[@christiandoninger5951]

For me the improvement of msaa in vr is huge...0x looks ablsolutly horrible, 2x also really bad, x4 is the sweatspot.

[@fan2hd277]

Iracing is completely fck up when it comes to gfx. And it is true lower settings will kill your fps more 😂

[@robloyst4514]

Hmmm. Seems that everything has no difference?

[@jeeziRacer]

Dude change your max pre rendered forms to zero and the stutters will disappear

[@robloyst4514]

I find saying “it does NOTHING” all the time now lol

[@jeeziRacer]

How can you be so knowledgeable about iracing and graphics but advertised the biggest piece of $Hit wheelbase that’s ever been made!!! Great video though

[@Reddeadreddeadtion]

7 minutes in and he’s STILL telling a meandering repetitive irrelevant story like my grandad would.