I’ve seen a few profile suggestions where people have turned down the force in game, while leaving the driver full power.
Is there a difference in resolution between what a game can output for force feedback vs what the driver/hardware can handle internally?
Just wondering if we’d preserve more detail by leaving the games at 100% and scaling in the driver.
A member of my community did some kind of well prepared blind test. The conclusion was that he decided for splitting the multipliers for both game and driver (e.g. 80% in game and 80% in driver for a total of 64%) but he also stated that he couldnt differ between the different settings. The difference you feel should be mostly placebo, as long as you aren’t clipping anywhere ofc.
I racing tends to be the Main Game where generally leaving the power of the wheel at 100% and then adjusting the force in game tends to be the most foolproof way of getting the full fidelity from the game This is because in opposition to other games they use an attenuation model where all of the forces start at 100% and are scaled back rather than a Gain model which amplifies or Multiplies the signal.
With iRacing though you can use lower wheel strength as well you just have to be mindful that you are not clipping the certain vehicle that you are trying to run by raising the at the wheel force to have to try to recreate signal that is now above the game imposed 100% level.
Thanks Jakob and bsohn!
This is negligible benefit as the drawback is dangerously high forces in crash situations.
The manuals have an important sentence:
ALWAYS do a test drive BEFORE enabling high torque!!! In game max FFB and the Simucube aswell??? Happy landing
my understanding is clipping begins with the game signal, what you put into the motor is what you are going to get out of it so always tune the game first to a point where you don’t get any clipping… this is one of the biggest advantages of owning a direct drive i have found, we can reduce the signal from game but still have huge power. a wheelbase like a logitech g29 simply would need the user to push the gain up and deal with clipping in order to feel feedback from the base.
for example ACC on pc starts to clip at around the 60 gain mark in game, you can observe this by looking at the grey bar in the bottom right when driving, if it flickers red then that is clipping and that happens often above a gain of 60, set the gain to around 58 or below and the signal delivered to the motor is perfect, no clipping at all and then you can go into the true drive software and set the power to how you like it knowing the clipping is being kept at bay and everything you feel is true to what is happening in game and nothing is ‘‘clipped’’ off the signal.
Are the games just outputting arbitrary values - like on a scale from 1-10,000? If so there wouldn’t really be such a thing as “clipping” in the game as all values they produce would be within that range.
Doesn’t that value then get sent to the driver? and the driver scales it based on what’s set for force in true drive?
Ie if the game outputs 10,000 and truedrive is maxed out, then that 10,000 would translate to 32nm on an ultimate, 25 on a pro and 17 on a sport?
From truedrive perspective, it could never ever know if the game ‘clipped’ (ie if the game calculated a force value above 10,000 and truncated to 10,000)?
yes
Wrong. Game will have to decide on what FFB level produced by physics model will be reported as 10000 via DirectInput to the game controller, and scale all appropriately.
The FFB wheel then scales this again as you describe.
True, but usually it is best to avoid constant 10000 to device, as one will loose detail in such situations. It would be best to scale the in-game FFB in such way that clipping is avoided for the most part.
I believe a balanced approach should render best ffb results while allowing some margin of user safety.
Game developers have expressed the complex challenges surrounding consistent ffb-signal output without inducing clipping. Adding to that challenge, is the use of mod-content, where even far greater inconsistencies may occur. Beta-testing of titles may also produce very extreme signal anomalies.
The short and simple fact is that such inconsistencies do exist and it’s up to us to use settings that provide the full ffb-dynamics while also operating the wheel at relatively safe power output levels.
Use of in-game or 3rd-party ffb-clipping tools can help establish a good baseline power output level and ffb-gain setting. Some titles (AC, RaceRoom, Pcars2, AMS2) offer live per-car ffb adjustment, that can be very useful for tuning and testing of ffb levels.
I doubt the difference in extreme approaches result is significant detail benefits, and certainly don’t warrant risking injuries.
that got me thinking, ffb as we know it is an “old technology” by now, and it seems the hardware on which it runs is advancing more and more with respect to the software, eg racing sims. do you think it could be possible for windows to upgrade their ffb api in order to adapt to the newer dd wheels, and in general to the ever more complex simulators?
Simucube beeps when Torque Clipping is all we need, keep your eyes on the track! 
Works on every game/sim
Good point, I forgot about that option with SC2.
In most cases the Game is what determines the clipping of their signal… and HOW the game goes about doing that is different from game to game… Avoiding this takes understanding how the game determines clipping. AC uses a gain model where they amplify the output and then once it hits a certain level that when it clips whereas a game like iRacing uses an attenuation model where everything is reduced from 100 or clipped output.
It is possible to clip the hardware but ONLY if the Hardware designer allows it as they can limit output forces or provide enough undocumented headroom to be able to successfully recreate signals that may exceed what is output by the game due to filtering or other things… It would be VERY rare to actually PHYSICALLy clip a FFB device other than just having a moment where you ask more of it than the PSU can handle (ie when an V1 SC2 Pro only has one PSU connected and you hit a bump and it shuts off)
so in FFB Clipping is basically loss of detail.