Gran Turismo Sport’s high-end bonuses: HDR is incredible,
but VR is not
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017...-end-bonuses-hdr-is-incredible-but-vr-is-not/
Gran Turismo VR: Not much gas in the tank
The same drool cannot be applied to the game's VR mode.
For one, PlayStation VR owners are limited to
Gran Turismo Sport's "VR Arcade" mode, which isn't even as fully featured as the 2D game's Arcade mode. While you can select from any racetrack in the game for a VR race, you cannot adjust opponent difficulty... and you cannot race against more than one opponent. The number of racers is likely limited to reduce the game's rendering strain in VR, but I am at a loss to understand why the difficulty is turned down to the stupidest setting the game can possibly muster.
That's doubly awful once you consider how much
GTS automatically assists drivers who dare enter the VR racing cockpit. Even though I manually disabled every assist the game has on offer, I was able to repeatedly trigger automatic slowdowns and turn assists while driving as crappily as possible in the game's VR mode. Both of those automatic VR assists are a little more subtle than when they're intentionally turned on in standard 2D driving, at least, and I have still been able to slam into walls or spin out violently.
In general, however,
GTS really, really doesn't want you feeling out of control while pushing PlayStation VR to its limits. What's weird, then, is that it's not a particularly
cozy VR racing game, either. Polyphony Digital has left the game's rally races enabled in VR for some reason, even though they produce the mode's most vomit-inducing lateral-drift moments. Meanwhile, for the standard, tolerable races that fill out most of VR Arcade, I saw nothing in the way of sharp grounding techniques like peripheral-blocking or cockpit-grounding to add comfort. Anybody who's entirely new to VR may want to hold off on this as their very first VR experience, as a result, but it's otherwise comfortable enough once you've gotten used to how VR works.
The game runs efficiently enough in VR, but like
DriveClub VR before it,
GTS's VR mode runs at a faked 120Hz refresh, which is really 60 frames per second with some interpolation automatically generated. This doesn't quite keep up with
GTS's sense of speed, and while the results shouldn't make anybody sick by default, they fall short of
Project Cars 2's default "low" settings for VR, which result in 90fps performance on PC—and therefore seems more fluid.
That game, additionally, feels more comfortable in VR, owing to more pronounced cockpit-anchoring visual details and a clearer sense of real car movement and inertia.
Adding real insult to VR injury, none of your progress or effort in VR Arcade mode pays off with in-game currencies like experience points, miles driven, or in-game currency.
