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First of all, you should know a bit more about the shader options presented in the rFactor configuration program. The shader selection is a very useful addition to the options.

You can select between...

DX7 for older machines with dated or limited graphics adapters.

DX8 for a good mix between performance and graphic goodness.

DX9 for newer machines and graphics cards.

DX9 will of course give the prettiest results, but may be too demanding on slightly older configurations. rFactor looks good in all shaders though, so if your card only supports DX7 or DX 8 there is no need to wait for your next hardware upgrade.

The option to select shader is something new to the gMotor2 engine used by rFactor and the upcoming GT Legends, where some of us encountered it for the first time and proceeded to completely overlook it. The result was less than acceptable frame rates for Jens in DX9. DX8 and DX7 work better with his configuration. Press "Crtl" + "F" to show fps.

If you experience micro stutters or brief graphic pauses, try enabling "Vsync" and / or increasing the value for "View Ahead". The first option you'll find in the configuration program, the latter is located in the GUI of rFactor under the video tab. Also experiment with the shaders.

After setting up your controllers, difficulty settings, rules and graphical options, many rFactor drivers headed for the track only to find that F1's were mixing it with GTR-type cars and mini-cars, The user is likely in a slower car — such as a standard Rhez — which from the outset is grossly underpowered. This leads to accidents where the faster cars constantly drive into you. Not our idea of good fun.

The solutions to avoid this are...

a) set the AI aggression to 0 (a tip posted by the developers) and...

b) make sure you select only the appropriate car classes. This is done when you are on the track-specific loading screen.

With cars matching each other performance-wise and with a zero-aggression setting for the AI, the possibility of being shot off the track by AI cars is vastly reduced.

Why would rFactor be shipped with these settings? We think it was an oversight. The developers intended the AI to give you a real fight but obviously it didn't quite work out as planned. There will surely be a fix for this in some future update as ISI is well aware of the problem thanks to a vocal audience.

As we said, rFactor is intended as a modding platform, and as such it must be able to handle different car classes such as GT1, GT2, GT3 and Le Mans group sports racing cars all in the same race. The initial settings certainly confirm that any type of car can be pitted against any other.

Racing Videos at Last!

When you attempt to export a replay to .avi using that feature you might find, as one of our testers did, that apparently you can't get it to work properly. If this is the case, open the .plr file in notepad, and search for the line containing "cvid". Now try changing "civd" to divx, or to any other compression software that you know you have the codecs on your computer.

TrackIR

TrackIR doesn't seem to be enabled by default. To enable it, go to the "Settings" and under "Control" you toggle "Hwplugin". Select any unused key to toggle it on.

It seems not all six degrees of freedom (6dof) are implemented. At least we couldn't zoom the view closer to the dashboard by moving closer to the screen.

Nevertheless, the ability to look left and right, up and down and tilt your head is present and the best thing is that the pan is smooth and easy to control. [Editor's Note: Sounds like Jens is becoming really accustomed to his TrackIR3 Pro!]

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