I'm not sure really, I've been floating between several different games and mostly been driving race cars on semi-slick or slick tires. It depends on the game I guess, Assetto Corsa feels very planted like you actually have rubber touching the road (something I always felt GT was lacking) even on street tires, and it's a good thing. You get a lot more info about what the tires are doing, you can feel them slipping or scrubbing, you can feel the side walls flexing, and you can feel when you've exceeded their grip limits. Where Assetto Corsa is lacking is in the communication of what other parts of the car are doing, you feel exactly what you'd feel in your real car's steering wheel but don't get any extra feedback to communicate gforces or weight transfer like you do in other games. From what I've seen, AC offers slicks, semi-slicks, street tires and 90's street tires (for older cars), it doesn't have multiple options (hard, medium, soft) for each compound. Street tires feel similar to Sport hards or mediums in GT, 90's street tires are like Comfort softs.
iRacing is closer to GT, has a bit of that floaty feeling like you're on an icy surface and could lose grip at any moment. I've not experimented with tires in iRacing, not even sure what different compounds are available. I know you can adjust the air pressure for each tire which makes a difference in how they handle. I think only racing cars are available in iRacing so I'm guessing they only offer racing tires.
I also have Race Room Racing Experience and their offering of DTM Experience 2014. Again, only race cars on offer here so only racing tires available (in DTM you do get the choice of Primes or Options). This one is a different beast, you have about a dozen (or more) options for adjusting FFB and it takes a while to get things feeling correct, but even when it's dialed in it feels like you're missing some communication from the tires. You get all kinds of environmental feedback but when you're really leaning on your tires it seems to be lacking in feedback. Still great fun though, it's free and you get a handful of cars/tracks for free with the option to buy more content (which is very reasonably priced, especially compared to iRacing). If I could get more feeling for the tires through the FFB it would probably be my favorite. Here's a video I made from Race Room Racing Experience (R3E) racing Daytona Prototypes at Indy Road.
So I guess I can't really say, for one reason because I haven't really spent enough time with any particular game to give a conclusive answer, and two because it's all so very different that it's hard to draw any comparisons (and because some games only have racing tires). I'd say in Assetto Corsa the street tires on a street car would be similar to SH or SM tires in GT, lots of grip but still pretty easy to get loose. This is one area where the PC games are lacking, street cars on street tires, especially vintage cars. Assetto Corsa has some but a lot of their "street cars" are LaFerrari's or 458 Italia's or Lotus Exige's which are really only "technically" street cars.
I've just been having so much fun trying all the different games and exploring all the features that I've wanted to experience for so long that GT6 hasn't even crossed my mind for weeks. Surprisingly, GT holds up fairly well against the PC sims as far as graphics and physics and even the new FFB in GT6 is decent in comparison. But it's so very lacking in features and offline play and that's become even more apparent now that I've been on the other side of the fence. During the week I get 2-3 hours of driving/racing in each day and on the weekends it's about 6-8 hours a day and almost all of that has just been from hot lapping, testing features, or racing the AI, things I got virtually no joy from in GT6 and hadn't done for many months.
I've done a few online races in iRacing (one yesterday at Road America with 60 cars!
) but haven't done any online racing in the other games because I haven't had any need to. GT6 is only good online and it became very difficult to get any kind of online racing going which made it a bit useless. But I have been missing the Mini racing so I might stick my head in this week if you guys have room. 👍
(the screens look a little mis-aligned because of the angle of the camera, but they line up pretty well from the driver's seat).
👍
