As some of you may know, I really love cars and as you do, driving them, sim racing in particular when it comes to the virtual world of racing, and it’s basically what I do when I have some free time on my hands. With that in mind, for this project, we actually partnered with Nvidia in cooperation with Gigabyte, in order to help us find the answer to what kind of competitive advantage can you get in the world of sim racing when you pair a GPU that can deliver high frame rates with a high refresh rate monitor.
Of course, this kind of job requires the most precise hands, reactions, and before all consistent driving, so besides me and my fairly average driving skills at best, I will be joined by two professional drivers and special guests – Miroslav Zrnčević and Martin Kodrić.
Miro is a test and development driver in Rimac Automobili, multiple Croatian drift champion, rally driver, automotive journalist, one of the founders of the Formula student team at Zagreb’s university of mechanical engineering, so basically anything that has to do with cars and driving, he’s there.
Martin has a wide racing pedigree, he’s currently a professional racing driver at McLaren, where he drives a 720S GT3, and with it last year he participated in the International GT Open championship, where he ended up in 3rd place overall.
So, yeah, we have some serious driving skills on the floor. And me.
Coming down to what are you all probably most interested in, our testing setup, here behind me we have a PC using Nvidia’s RTX 2060 Super, which with its 2176 CUDA cores and Turing architecture proved to be the sweet spot for our 1080p 165 Hz monitor delivering well above 165 FPS in the iRacing simulator which we are going to use today. Speaking of the monitor, in charge of showing us where we’re actually going is Gigabyte’s Aorus CV27F gaming monitor, a FullHD 27” VA display boasting a 165 Hz refresh rate, 1 ms response time, HDR support, 90% DCI-P3 coverage and much more. On the other hand, something like a GTX 1660 Super is also a great alternative for users who are playing at 1080p and a bit lower refresh rate.
Back to the configuration itself, we paired all of this with Intel’s latest Core i7 10700K on Gigabyte’s Z490 Gaming X motherboard with Noctua’s NH-U12S Chromax Black air cooler on it, 64 GB’s of 3200 MHz Kingston’s HyperX Fury DDR4 RAM and their 1 TB KC2000 M.2 NVMe SSD, running in a BeQuiet’s Pure Base 500 DX chassis and powered up with Seasonic’s Prime TX 750W power supply.
Jumping over to Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 2060 Super, just a quick reminder that it comes with dedicated AI processors called Tensor Cores, which are enabling the use of Nvidia’s latest DLSS 2.0 technology in games that support this feature, offering improvement in image quality alongside boosting your framerate, even more, so basically you’re getting best of both worlds.
During the course of our testing, we are using Nvidia’s Shadow Play for on-screen recording since it has minimal impact on the games’ performance thanks to the use of NVENC encoder technology. Be sure to also check out Nvidia’s latest RTX Voice feature if you do a lot of team talk, it can do a lot for you in terms of the noise cancellation. OK, with everything laid out, let’s get to it, shall we, first off a little chat with our participants, and for everything in regards to that and how the testing went, be sure to check out the video down below!
Once again a big thank you to our sponsors for making this possible, and of course to our participants, Miro and Martin, make sure to follow them, their links will be in the description box of the video above, as well as everything else related to this project in case you need any additional information.
Gigabyte GeForce® RTX 2060 SUPER™ GAMING OC 8G – https://www.gigabyte.com/Graphics-Card/GV-N206SGAMING-OC-8GC#kf
Gigabyte GeForce® GTX 1660 SUPER™ GAMING OC 6G – https://www.gigabyte.com/Graphics-Card/GV-N166SGAMING-OC-6GD#kf
That’s it for this time, catch you in the next one!
