Project C.A.R.S - Community Assisted Racing Simulator

Long story incoming. So I bought this game on release day back when I had my old system (Q6600, R9 280, 4GB DDR2) and was unable to play it both because of its high requirements and performance on AMD GPU's. Fast forward to recently and I finally have a computer to kick this games butt and the time to put my head down and get it set up just right.

It has literally taken weeks of on and off tweaking, testing, configuring, troubleshooting etc., but I've finally got it working the way I've always wanted. For the controller settings (yeah, I know this is a wheel game. 10 years of Forza on Xbox have taught me very good analog stick control) I started with this guide and slowly tweaked each setting to my liking for GT3 racing.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=439605295

The visual settings were what ended up taking most of my time, especially since one track can run just fine in 4k with max settings while others are barely playable @1080p with medium settings. These are extreme examples, Donington with 24 other cars and 85 AI difficulty and Le Mans at night in the rain with 55 other cars on 85 AI difficulty respectively, but both can happen in game so therefore need to be prepared for.

Days of testing ended up with me testing everything from 720p with low settings up to 4k with ultra settings, with the vast majority of races ending up at the same FPS in both circumstances! I went through each and every setting changing only that one from low/medium/high/ultra to see which setting was killing the FPS. None of them ended up making much of a difference to the FPS going from low to ultra, so I kept them all on ultra.

Next I tried each post processing effect on its own to see if it was one of them messing stuff up. Again, no more than a 4FPS difference when they were all off to all on. I tried all kinds of V-sync from the in game setting to every setting available in the NVCP and the game still ran poorly. Playable, but just not enjoyable. I forgot about it for a few days because my brain hurt, but when I came back I remembered hearing about some command line options when I bought PCARS on release day. I tried each of them out individually until finding out what they did, and boy howdy was I surprised!

-dx11mt had the biggest gains by far, making Le Mans at night in a thunderstorm with 56 total cars @1620p with ultra settings and DS2X AA totally playable with a min/max/avg of 45/96/67 while looking downright next gen.
-pthreads 4 also helped out more and more with spreading the load out to the hyperthreaded cores as more AI cars were added to any given race.

Lastly, the -novr option seemed to help a little bit with some daytime tracks that were stuttering. Keeping these three commands enabled has made the game super playable and massively enjoyable. I'm now sitting at 1620p through DSR, all ultra settings (even detailed grass) with DS2X AA enabled. I have 16xAF forced through the NVCP and the in game AF turned off as it still left things blurry even at 16x. Every race runs buttery smooth and I have way higher CPU and GPU usage than ever before using those command lines.

I know this is a LONG story and most people didn't make it this far, but I spent so much time and frustration with this game that I figured this might just help somebody out.

TL : DR = Bought PCARS on release, couldn't play it. Upgraded to current hardware, added the 3 commands mentioned above to the game launcher, turned all settings up and the game runs perfectly.