BUILD YOUR OWN DRIVING SIM
It’s expensive, but worth it
So, you’re interested in rigging up a driving sim. What are the bare minimum ingredients, and what’s recommended for the best experience?
Perhaps contrary to what you might assume if you have no previous experience of driving sims, peripherals— rather than display technology—are the most critical components. We would recommend a proper seatpod, along with both a decent force-feedback wheel and a pedal box.
As we found, those items can quickly add up to serious money, especially if you want a pedal box with decent feel, thanks to load cell technology. You could easily spend $1,000 for your seat, wheel, and pedals. Scary.
We’ve touched on the VR display option on page 42, but if you’re going with a more conventional screen, size is more important than resolution for driving sims. 1080p on a big display is plenty, which means a cheap HDTV can work well. Multiple monitors for an expanded field of view can be great, too, but obviously come with cost implications. The projector option we went for worked surprisingly well, but it can be tricky to set up, and it’s less flexible. Even really bright projectors really only look good in low ambient light conditions.
As for your actual PC, if you’re going down the 1080p display route, via some kind of flat panel or a projector, you won’t need all that much graphics firepower. A mid-range GPU and CPU combo should be plenty. Go for a multi-monitor or VR solution, though, and you’re going to need high-end graphics. But, then, your budget is probably going to be that much bigger, anyway.
Overall, getting into driving sims and achieving a decent experience isn’t going to be cheap. There’s no avoiding that. But if you already have a large display of some kind, you can get most of the fun for under $1,000.