Review: GTR2

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Performance

Screen shots for this review were taken in DX9 at 1280x1024, anti-aliasing x2, and all settings maximized. Good for taking screen shots, very bad for high frame rates and impossible for racing a full field unless you have the latest and greatest hardware.

Running the simulation at 1024x768, no AA / FSAA with most settings on full, high or medium as per the screen shots of my settings below, the game so far offers very smooth and playable frame rates in normal conditions as well as rain. If you have the horsepower to run GTR2 in DX9, some level of anti-aliasing and with high-resolution skins and cockpit interiors, GTR2 looks absolutely gorgeous (as opposed to just "pretty" in lower settings).

Going into a the 2004 Spa Proximus 24 hour race with some 30 opponent cars participating and displayed, the frame rates are borderline on the reviewer's test machine with the above settings.

I experienced serious slow-downs to 1 or 2 fps on occasions, and I think the slow-downs are related to the number of cars participating in the race; i.e. 30. You set that number in the track summary menu. Lowering this number seemed to help reduce the slow-down issues. Perhaps it is even related to AI activity somewhere on the circuit, perhaps as the AI decides to pit, or as some of them have accidents.

I also experienced some CTD's when reloading saved races. Possibly this is related to the number of cars and the slow-downs? I do not know.

When letting the AI drive my car, the slow-downs apparently do not occur.

Racing at night generally cost me some 10 fps, which I find is comparable to the cost in GTL and rFactor.

Menus

Generally the menus have been streamlined a lot in GTR2 over the predecessor, and once you familiarize yourself with the layout, which does not take much time, you can almost push the right menu button without looking for it.

They're still not quite as intuitive and seamless to navigate as the menus in benchmark sims like GPL and NASCAR Racing 2003 Season, but they do all right. I'd have liked for the scrolling in menus when selecting tracks or cars to be replaced with drop down-boxes. Perhaps it is just me, but I had trouble finding out how to select single make races (look for the gray small triangles indicating that a click on the one pointing to the right will take you to the selection screen) and some difficulty in finding out how to save a lap as a ghost lap. How to do that will be described in a later section of this review.

Before firing up the engines, one of the issues we raised with the predecessor GTR thankfully has now been properly resolved. In the earlier iteration you had to constantly tell and retell the simulation which of the realism modes you wanted; easy, intermediate, semi-real or real-real. Now you only need to set your difficulty level once. If you wish to change it you go into the appropriate menu and change it, but thankfully the choice you make now ”sticks”.

For this SimHQ review, we ran and tested with the simulation settings exclusively.

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