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Crowds in racing games have long been the weakest part of even the most realistic titles out there, even titles like F1 24. After all, not many people care too much if you’re zooming past them at 200 miles per hour. But with the PS5 Pro and PC gaming now actually hitting 8K fidelity, low detailed assets are now far easier to spot, and risk standing out and jarring when everything else around them is so realistic.
F1 devs vow to improve crowds
In the latest episode of the VideoGamer Podcast, we sat down with F1 24’s Simon Lumb, technical producer at Codemasters, who revealed the team is now actively looking at improving these ‘furniture’ assets as a result of fidelity and technology improving.
“The decision about how do you populate crowds, how do you improve the look, the feel, the realism, it’s all part of an authenticity pass,” he said.
“We want to improve to our crowds,” Lumb added. “There’s opportunities to take the graphics technology that’s always moving forward to give us better looking crowds, so it’s definitely something we talk about and hopefully we see some updates in future titles. Now we’ve got 8K, the fidelity, the resolution and what you can see in the crowds really increases.”
Lumb also explained that while improved crowds may be something coming along in the future, there are already signifiacnt changes relating to in-game fences designed to make the most out of the new resolution. “We tuned it (the fences) really effectively for 4K view but you add 8K to that and you kind of double that resolution,” he said.
You can see at what point the fences need to change because now we can see further. At that point, the art team saw it, took a look at it and agreed that it needed to reqork the fences. F1 has a lot of fences, so you rework that, you lift the whole game, you bring new fidelity.”
While F1 25 is still some time away, the PS5 Pro version of the F1 24 certainly makes use of the PS5 Pro’s beefed up hardware. Lumb mentioned that PSSR was “too good to turn down” in this year’s game, and told us that this is just the start of the journey exploring the newer, more powerful technology.
F1 24
- Platform(s): PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S, Xbox Series S/X, Xbox Series X
- Genre(s): Racing