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Assetto Corsa EVO made its big Early Access launch on Steam yesterday, bringing the next iteration of the racing franchise to both flatscreen and PC VR headsets. It’s getting mixed reviews, although VR users in particular are warning that you should wait for incoming patches, which will hopefully address the game’s currently questionable optimization.

KUNOS Simulazioni, developer behind both Assetto Corsa (2014) and Assetto Corsa Competizione (2018), released their long-awaited follow-up, Assetto Corsa EVO. The Early Access version boasts five tracks, 20 vehicles, single player, support for SteamVR headsets, as well as triple screen support.

While the studio promises the full slate of content is set to arrive in successive updates, which will include a total of 100 cars, 25 tracks, open world map, career and multiplayer mode, for now it appears VR users aren’t exactly happy with the state of the game.

User reviews are pouring in, with the game now counting over 2,700 reviews, garnering it a ‘Mixed’ score. Although some complaints mention the lack of features, which KUNOS Simulazioni promises are still yet to come, many of those specifically mentioning VR support are fairly cut-and-dry. It’s simply not optimized well enough, which has left it largely unplayable in VR.

“I won’t comment on the performance issues, as this is early access, only remark is that VR is currently unplayable,” says Steam user Poloman. “I have 150 fps on 3440×1440, but can’t get more that 30 [FPS] in VR.”

“Unplayable in VR with a RTX 4090 and i9 13900k at lowest settings (only targeting 80hz too). It has constant latency spikes making the game unplayable at any setting,” reports Mattios. “Flatscreen works fine, maxed out it barely hits 80% GPU and 10% CPU usage without upscaling”

“Can’t recommend it in its current state, performance optimization is just not there, at least for VR. [I have a Radeon] 7600X + 7900 XT getting 50 fps running on a Quest 3 with Link and OpenXR, and that’s with a single car on track in practice, on the minimum graphics settings,” says Dan in their user review. “And that’s already disregarding visual glitches, that happened mostly on the menu for me. Besides that, the default FFB settings are not at all what I expected from Kunos. All in all, wait for the coming patches to even consider it.”

All of KUNOS Simulazioni’s Assetto Corsa racing games have followed similar Early Access launches in years past, which makes the slow drip of features no real surprise. And while VR hasn’t always been a day-one feature, it has been an integral part of the series.

The original Assetto Corsa was an early champion of VR, having previously included experimental support for Rift headsets starting back to 2013, and later gaining support for additional headsets in 2017 with the adoption of OpenVR. Full VR support for Assetto Corsa Competizione was released a month after it was available on traditional monitors.

The studio maintains its full 1.0 release will be ready “within less than one year from the start of Early Access,” and we’re definitely hoping to see more optimizations between now and then to make VR worth the $32 price tag.