It seems to me that a lot of people don't take into account these games are having to run on the base PS4 as well. PCars 2 on the base PS4 with rain and high stress situations is really not that good (in a visuals only sense) so I can only imagine how bad GT Sport would be (visually) under the same circumstances.
FWIW, I reviewed both games on a base PS4 before moving to a Pro last Black Friday. While the visuals improved with both, I'd say it was GT Sport that was smoother from an FPS perspective on the base hardware. The fluctuating frame rate of the PS3 era games drove me nuts, but there were only a tiny handful of very quick variations when I did the review.
Both are better on the Pro, naturally, but PCARS2 still can have dips, whereas I'm pretty sure I've only had one with GT Sport (a major pileup in Sport Mode). The big difference IMO is that PCARS2 gives you the option to overwork the system, by having a huge field of AI. IIRC, there was a post on the official forums actually telling people to knock the number down a bit to improve performance.
I'm not sure if I consider that option a positive or negative. It's good that players have choices, but it paints the game in a negative light if it can't keep up, at least on consoles. It's a bit like PD's decision to limit the camera from getting too close to Standards in GT5. I totally understood why PD did it — Standards looked like crap — but it actually sort of drew
more attention.
The "war" just got real, with Porsche esports dumping the Forza program for GT Sports' esports program.
That's (possibly intentionally) misleading. The Japanese regional Porsche esport will use GT Sport, which makes sense when you consider there's practically zero Xbox market penetration over there.
If anything, Porsche is embracing every developer now that the EA shackles are off. It just chose SMS to be the partner for the 992's first digital experience, and there's an iRacing cup that's just been announced too. The eCup used Assetto Corsa in Italy, and there was a recent FM7 challenge too, where the winner could earn a test drive.
has a more varied (if numerically smaller) vehicle pool (of stuff you actually want to race)
It's all subjective. Personally, I'd prefer the 800-strong list of cars going from pre-war classics, through four different decades of F1, by way of Group B legends, dozens of Porsches, Ferraris, and Lambos (each), as well as all the most modern metal, than a 200-strong list where almost 20% of the lineup are flights of fancy — and that's before we get to the cars made for the primary racing classes of the game, which by dint of those classes, are quite a lot similar to each other.
The quality of FM7's car lineup plus the quantity makes it practically untouchable IMO. Certainly this gen, but almost even across any. I do miss a chunk of cars from GT6's lineup, but they were largely Standards, and I'd rather not have those back until they're redone in full hi-def glory like the Supra and 22B. I also miss some of FM4's, of which T10/Playground are also slowly doing the same thing.
Have you actually played Forza Motorsport in the last few years? It feels nothing like Need for Speed. Even the Horizon games have a more sophisticated and realistic handling model than the NFS series. The Crew games are the closest I've seen to the NFS model.
Super GT (since multiple people here have cited him as some sort of authority, for some reason), actually said that he slightly prefers Forza's physics model, because he thinks you can "feel" the uniqueness of each car more tangibly when driving them. This is purely subjective, and one man's opinion, but it demonstrates that it's not quite the massive gulf it's being portrayed as.
If someone else prefers GT's handling and physics, that's completely fine. Both games are fine.
I said something
roughly similar when
I drove Porsches at the PEC Silverstone last year. But it applied to a very specific portion of the driving: the drifting. The transition from grip to slip felt largely like it does in FM7, but the threshold was obviously much lower in real life thanks to the low-friction surface. Cars have a sense of weight to them in FM7 which I think is one of its big strengths. I was also lucky enough to drive a
Veloster N at full clip on a race track last month, and that behaved similar to the one in-game (though not on Thunderhill, since it's criminally under-represented in video games). I find front drive easier to judge between virtual and real, and the N gave the same sort of "no sir I do not like this" response if you dropped it into a corner too fast.
GT Sport feels best to me in Gr.4, especially that Cayman, but sadly I can't compare it to the real world (at least not yet). Gr.3 gets a little glassy, and it can sometimes be hard to know when you've stepped over the limit based on feedback. Though, I will say, whatever settings were being used at the World Finals, I liked them. The wheel gave pretty clear notice on when I was overloading the tires, from either end.
Both games get certain aspects of driving quite right, and I think rather tellingly, neither one goes deep into the numbers side. I'm not saying the devs aren't busy driving themselves crazy with all manner of equations, but the
feel is important. We're never going to get a replacement for the seat-o-the-pants-o-meter, so there's some things that will need to be fudged slightly to make up for that. With both FM7 and GT Sport, I can jump into a rig (or behind a pad) and feel at home pretty quickly. Other titles sometimes require a lot of pre-race fiddling to get there — sometimes for each car!
