A post on the official Gran Turismo game website has confirmed what we pretty much expected: the next Gran Turismo 7 update will land on Tuesday, February 21.
The core of the update is of course PlayStation VR2 compatibility, just ahead of the launch of the hardware itself on February 22. It will bring full PSVR2 support to all areas of GT7, with the natural exception of local two-player splitscreen, with the game being developed from day one for PSVR2 compatibility.
It’s something we’ve experienced ourselves, spending some time with GT7 in PSVR2 at Sony’s North American headquarters in San Mateo, California. You can see our full review below:
Gran Turismo 7 on PSVR2 runs at 120fps, reprojected from 60fps, with twin 4K HDR OLED displays running at a resolution of 2000×2040 per eye. Thanks to eye-tracking technology, using internal cameras to detect where you are looking, the title also employs a feature called foveated rendering.
That’s named for the very center of your vision: a part of the retina called the fovea centralis, which has the densest concentration of light receptor cells and covers just 2 degrees of your visual field but accounts for 50% of your brain’s visual cortex.
Foveated rendering leverages this by concentrating processing power on delivering the greatest detail where you’re currently looking. You can see the effect in still images of PSVR2, but not in the real thing as the cameras catch you trying to look at lower detail areas and makes them higher detail!
As well as being able to drive and race in all modes using PSVR2, players will have access to a new “VR Showroom”, which allows you to walk around your cars with 12 different new background scenes. You can even get inside the cars and look around the interiors too.
Naturally this will be a major update for PlayStation 5 players, but as PlayStation 4 does not support PlayStation VR2 you won’t be able to take advantage of the feature without upgrading your console — as well as picking up the $549.99/€599.99/£529.99 PSVR2 headset. We’re not sure at this time if the PS4 version of GT7 will support PSVR2 when played on a PS5 either, which may necessitate a $10/€10/£10 game version upgrade too.
For the time being we only know that update 1.29 will add PSVR2 support, with no other new content being announced yet. The most recent content update for GT7 came two months ago, on December 15 2022, and players on both platforms are yearning for further car and track content.
We won’t have a precise time for the update on February 21 until the next game maintenance notice, but as the date appears to be published across all of the regional sites we’d assume it will land at or around 0700 UTC as usual. Watch this space for more information as we get it.
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